Molly Ball | The Atlantichttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/2017-12-16T17:45:31-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p><em><small>Updated and <a href="#Correx">corrected</a> on December 16, 2017</small></em></p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">The man on the bed</span> in the Tokyo apartment was shriveled and weak. His bare legs poked like sticks out of his short one-piece pajamas. As he beckoned to his daughter, Debbie, his arm shook. “Put me in the wheelchair,” he said in a hoarse whisper.</p><p>When I first met Bernie Krisher, in 2001, he was spry and wiry, with apparently infinite energy. He seemed to hardly sleep, preferring to spend every moment badgering someone for something. His had been a lifetime of willfulness. As a child, he escaped the Holocaust. As a reporter in Asia, he interviewed President Sukarno of Indonesia and the Japanese emperor Hirohito, then launched a tabloid that revolutionized Japanese media.</p><p>In “retirement,” he became a humanitarian, flouting international sanctions to bring rice to North Korea and pouring vast sums into war-ravaged Cambodia. There he built hundreds of schools, founded an orphanage and a hospital, and started <i>The Cambodia Daily</i>, where I worked from 2001 to 2003. He was constantly thinking of ways to better the country—persuading J. K. Rowling to let him translate <i>Harry Potter</i> into Khmer (and sell copies for 50 cents), say, or helping the <i>New York Times </i>columnist Nicholas Kristof <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/opinion/leaving-the-brothel-behind.html?_r=0">buy brothel workers out of servitude</a>.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>But when I visited Krisher in Tokyo this fall, I found him much reduced: At age 86, he had experienced a stroke and contracted an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. He could scarcely see or hear, and his comprehension was foggy. He spent his days shuttling up and down the hallway between his bed and the living room, where his wife, Akiko, who has dementia, often sat motionless.</p><p>The last time I had been in contact with Krisher, I was the sick one. About a year after I’d gone to work for <i>The Daily</i>, I began to suffer from a mysterious illness. On my 24th birthday it was diagnosed as cancer, but the flimsy insurance Krisher granted his expat staffers would not, based on a technicality, cover treatment. I asked Krisher—who managed the paper from Tokyo, visiting semiannually—whether he could help somehow. He eventually contacted the insurance company; by then, though, I had begun chemotherapy, and my doctor and family had persuaded the insurance company to cover most of my expenses.<a href="#Correx">*</a><a id="Text 1" name="Text%201"></a></p><p>But I had not come to Tokyo to confront Krisher over that long-ago incident. I had come because his legacy was in crisis, as were Cambodia’s hopes for democracy.</p><p>The government had forced a shutdown of <i>The</i> <i>Daily</i>, which, despite its tiny circulation of about 5,000, had been the paper of record for Cambodia’s civil society: Its courageous reporters had regularly broken news that the rest of the country’s media then followed. The closure was part of a broad crackdown on Cambodia’s independent press and institutions—one that would in short order see the opposition leader jailed and multiple watchdog groups shuttered. The bank accounts of Krisher’s charities had been frozen, and Debbie and her husband, who ran the charities day to day, had been threatened with arrest.</p><p>Krisher wanted to tackle the problem the way he had always tackled problems—by storming in and demanding to be heard. He had planned to fly to Cambodia the day I visited, but his doctors had talked him out of the trip. If the flight didn’t finish him off, they worried, the Cambodians might: His name was posted in every passport-control kiosk at the Phnom Penh airport.</p><p>To appease her father, Debbie had tried distracting him: The paper wasn’t ending, she said, just being reincarnated.</p><p>“What are we doing with <i>The Cambodia</i> <i>Daily</i>?” she yelled into his ear. “Opa, what are we going to do?”</p><p>“We’re taking it offshore,” he said.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Krisher was born </span>in Frankfurt in 1931 to Polish Jewish parents. In 1937, the family fled Germany, eventually settling in Queens. After college and the Army, Krisher spent a year in Tokyo on a Ford Foundation grant. He fell in love with his interpreter and brought her back to New York, where they married. In 1962, the couple returned to Japan, and he got a job at <i>Newsweek</i>.</p><p>Krisher, who worked his way up to bureau chief, specialized in writing puffy Q&amp;As; he was legendary for who he knew. Once, in a Tokyo bookstore, he buttonholed Sukarno, who called Krisher “crazy”—and invited him to Jakarta. In turn, Sukarno introduced him to the Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk, a former king who, following Cambodia’s independence from French rule in 1953, had refashioned himself as prime minister, albeit an autocratic one. Krisher’s proudest achievement was an exclusive interview with Hirohito, which he still boasts is the only one the Japanese emperor ever granted. In fact, this is typical Krisherian exaggeration: Hirohito gave many such interviews.</p><p>Krisher was also famous for his difficult personality. Imperious and bullying, he berated staffers for failing at tasks he’d never assigned them. According to Alan Field, a reporter who worked under Krisher, he caused at least one young woman at <i>Newsweek</i> to have a nervous breakdown. Eventually, he was fired.</p><p>Not long afterward, Krisher founded his own magazine, a gossipy weekly called <i>Focus</i>. Modeled on <i>People</i>, it made its name off tawdry scoops, such as a photo of a politician urinating on a ginkgo tree, and another photo that Krisher described as “Mia Farrow getting out of a car and her legs were spread apart and she wasn’t wearing panties.” <i>Focus</i>, which is now defunct, sold millions of copies and (together with a <i>Newsweek</i> termination settlement) helped make Krisher rich. Despite the magazine’s profitability, when I spoke with Krisher in Tokyo, he expressed regret. “It was pornography,” he told me.</p><p>In the early 1990s, his old friend Sihanouk, the deposed Cambodian leader, called to ask a favor. The country had recently emerged from decades of civil war, and its people were preparing for their first real election. Sihanouk asked Krisher whether he would be willing to help rehabilitate Cambodia.<a href="#Correx">*</a></p><p>Krisher, naturally, said yes.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Sihanouk’s years out of power</span> had marked a bloody period for Cambodia. The Communist Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and orchestrated a genocide that killed as many as 3 million Cambodians. In 1979, the regime was driven out by the Vietnamese, who occupied the country for a decade while the Khmer Rouge waged resistance from the countryside. The Vietnamese tapped as their prime minister a former Khmer Rouge commander named Hun Sen.</p><p>In 1989, the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia, and in 1991, the warring parties signed peace accords. In turn, the United Nations embarked on an unprecedented effort to build a democracy from scratch. As soldiers, police, and aid workers flooded in, UN administrators helped the Cambodians write a constitution, which declared its commitment to “principles of liberal democracy and pluralism,” including due process, property rights, and freedom of expression.</p><p>And so, in 1993, Krisher started his English-and-Khmer-language newspaper out of an old hotel on the Mekong riverfront. He drafted a few Americans to run it, and they recruited Cambodian staffers who had worked as fixers or translators. In a country where the local press was mostly corrupt or partisan, the paper, whose motto was “All the news without fear or favor,” aimed to embody objective journalism, and to train a generation of journalists.</p><p>Although 90 percent of eligible voters participated in the UN-administered 1993 elections, Cambodian democracy got off to a rocky start. The royalists, led by Sihanouk’s son Prince Norodom Ranariddh, got the most votes, but Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, which came in second, refused to accept the result. After a standoff, Ranariddh and Hun Sen were made co–prime ministers. A bloodless coup had taken place, and the international community, wary of a return to civil war, had looked away.</p><p>The country’s needs seemed infinite. Krisher pumped his connections for money and started project after project, from the orphanage and the schools to an initiative that paid families to educate their daughters. He was not fussy about his donors. One school was funded by—and named for—the brother of Henry Kissinger, who, as Nixon’s secretary of state, had directed a bombing campaign that killed thousands of Cambodians. To build his hospital, Krisher partnered with a Japanese religious leader whose sect has been called a cult.</p><p>The UN stayed in Cambodia for just 18 months, after which the constitution was only lightly observed. In 1997, violent clashes pushed out Hun Sen’s rivals, allowing him to take sole control, which he has never relinquished. Today he is one of the world’s longest-serving leaders.</p><p>But even as Hun Sen consolidated power, his country’s dependence on foreign aid required him to pay lip service to constitutional ideals. At meetings, he would hold up <i>The Daily </i>as proof of press freedom. There were hiccups: Once, during a Mekong River booze cruise, the information minister told me he was revoking the paper’s license over a translation error. But Krisher used his connections to smooth things over, as he always did. Later that year, <i>The Daily</i> landed a rare interview with Hun Sen.</p><p><i>The Daily</i> was not progovernment, but neither was it antigovernment. Our job wasn’t to take down Hun Sen; it was to accurately report what was happening. Covering the country’s first local elections, in 2002, I found that many Cambodians viewed the opposition, led by a French-educated former banker, as out of touch. The ruling Cambodian People’s Party won by a wide margin, in an election that observers hailed as a positive step for democracy.</p><p>As for the paper’s mission of training journalists, it succeeded beyond Krisher’s hopes: <i>The Daily</i>’s Cambodian alumni staffed bureaus in Phnom Penh and abroad, wrote books, and directed documentaries. Over the years, as young expats came and went, the Cambodians, more so than the foreigners, were the ones training their colleagues. <i>The Daily</i>’s American alumni now work at publications including <i>The Atlantic</i>, <i>The New York Times</i>, and <i>The Washington Post</i>, and one has won a Pulitzer.<a href="#Correx">*</a></p><p>However high-quality its journalism, <i>The Daily</i>’s offices were run-down to the point of crumbling, with donated Apple IIs and salvaged furniture. In 2001, staff barely got word of the 9/11 attacks, because Krisher hadn’t paid the cable bill. As Ryun Patterson, the night editor, scrambled to update the paper, Krisher called from Washington, D.C., where he could see smoke billowing from the Pentagon. That wasn’t why he was calling. He wanted to check the wording of a brief item about a staffer’s defamation lawsuit.</p><p>The staffer, Kay Kimsong, had pioneered <i>The</i> <i>Daily</i>’s business coverage. When the foreign minister accused him of defamation for truthful reporting, Kimsong stood little chance in the corrupt courts. Still, Krisher left Kimsong responsible for his own defense—and suggested that he spend a few days in jail as a goodwill gesture. Kimsong soon left to work for the country’s other English-language paper, <i>The Phnom Penh Post</i>, which (unlike <i>The Daily</i>) encouraged Cambodians to work in management.</p><p>As for me, in 2003 I went to the U.S. for chemotherapy, which was successful. Four months later, I wanted to say goodbye to Cambodia. I asked Krisher whether I could return to <i>The Daily</i> for a final month’s work, but he said no. I returned anyway, and worked for free.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">As Krisher’s health has declined,</span> Debbie and her husband, Douglas Steele, have taken over many of his affairs. In 2014, Douglas moved from Tokyo to Phnom Penh to run <i>The Daily</i>, arriving as Cambodia’s political winds were changing. Sam Rainsy, an exiled opposition leader, had been allowed back just before the 2013 elections, in what Hun Sen intended as a prodemocracy gesture. The regime was blindsided by what happened next. Tens of thousands of Cambodians showed up to Rainsy’s speeches. The previously fractured opposition, which had recently united under one banner, won 45 percent of the vote to the ruling party’s 49 percent, despite widespread reports of irregularities and voter suppression.</p><p>Claiming victory, the opposition launched a wave of largely nonviolent protests that continued until January 2014, when a few rogue protesters clashed with police and four were shot dead. The next day, the Interior Ministry banned political gatherings of more than 10 people, and the cowed opposition agreed to accept 55 seats in parliament to the ruling party’s 68 seats.</p><p>For the next national election, in 2018, Hun Sen is not taking any chances. In August, the Krishers received a letter claiming that <i>The Daily</i> was not properly registered (it operated under a decades-old license) and that it owed 25 billion riel—about $6.3 million—in taxes. Soon after, Hun Sen, in a speech, decried the paper as a “thief.” (He has taken to quoting, approvingly, Donald Trump’s attacks on the press. Once a beacon of freedom to the world, America now offers inspiration to dictators.) <i>The Daily</i>’s advertisers withdrew, leaving it unable to operate. It announced that it would close its doors on September 4.</p><p><i>The Daily</i> was not the only organization targeted. Radio stations broadcasting Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, U.S.-backed services that provide independent news to many rural Cambodians, were shuttered, as was the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute.</p><p>Once, Hun Sen might have hesitated to so flagrantly defy the foreign-aid community. But Cambodia is less dependent on the West than it once was. China now provides the country with nearly four times as much direct aid as the U.S. does and is a major source of private investment. Phnom Penh, formerly a sleepy backwater, is today dotted with skyscrapers-in-progress, their scaffolding hung with Chinese signs.</p><p>On September 3, <i>The Daily</i> prepared to publish a commemorative final issue, filled with reflections and analyses. But before dawn, news broke that Kem Sokha, the leader of the opposition party, had been accused of treason and jailed. As <i>Daily</i> reporters rushed to the scene, staffers who had planned to spend a leisurely, mournful day in the newsroom found themselves <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/world/asia/cambodia-daily-newspaper.html">expanding the edition</a>. The news pushed <i>The Daily</i>’s closure off the top of the front page. The final issue instead featured Sokha in handcuffs, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/04/cambodia-daily-shuts-with-dictatorship-parting-shot-at-prime-minister-hun-sen">with the headline</a> “ ‘Descent Into Outright Dictatorship.’ ”</p><p>Things have only deteriorated since. In October, Hun Sen threatened opposition figures with arrest, and many lawmakers fled the country. The government has also moved to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/world/asia/cambodia-court-opposition.html?_r=0">dissolve the opposition</a>, forcing its candidates off the ballot. “The 25-year international effort to create a multiparty, rule-of-law-respecting, due-process-respecting regime in Cambodia has now died,” John Sifton, Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director, told me. “We have reached the end of the line. Democracy is dead in Cambodia.”</p><p>Debbie and Douglas say they still plan to turn <i>The</i> <i>Daily</i> into an online-only news service, with information from byline-less Cambodians fed to a news desk in Bangkok. But their bare-bones website is blocked in-country, and the project has hit various snags.</p><p>As for the Cambodians who worked for <i>The</i> <i>Daily</i>, sometimes at great personal risk, many are in difficult straits. Some have found work as stringers or fixers, but they are on a government blacklist that prevents them from covering official events. When I visited Cambodia in October, right after seeing Krisher, I traveled to Phnom Penh’s outskirts to see a couple of old colleagues—Saing Soenthrith, who was orphaned by the genocide, and Van Roeun, an environmental journalist who broke important stories on the country’s illegal deforestation. Roeun’s foyer was filled with cages—he was raising fighting cocks to earn money for his children’s school fees. Soenthrith, for his part, was dying of kidney disease.</p><p>Their plight struck me as a metaphor for the West’s involvement in Cambodia: For all the good intentions, the gifts from abroad were only temporary. The structures that foreigners tried to build weren’t sustainable—Cambodia’s entrenched power was too ruthless, its inertial force too strong. <i>The</i> <i>Daily</i> couldn’t survive without Krisher’s force of will; democracy couldn’t survive once the international community moved on.</p><p>I thought back to that day in Tokyo, when I asked Krisher what he believed his newspaper had contributed to Cambodian society. Debbie yelled the question into his ear. He could hardly see me and didn’t remember who I was, but he glared in my direction. “It’s now a democracy,” he replied, haltingly.</p><p>“But they closed our paper down,” Debbie shouted. “Is that a democracy?”</p><p>Krisher was silent. “Opa?” she yelled.</p><p>“Put me in the wheelchair,” he muttered again.</p><hr><p><small><a href="#Text%201">*</a><a id="Correction" name="Correction"></a><em> This article originally stated that Bernie Krisher failed to assist the author with a health-insurance problem in 2003, when he was her employer. The article noted that Krisher denied this, saying he had appealed to the insurance company without success. After the article went to press, Krisher located emails from that time showing that he had attempted to help the author, but that the problem had by that time been resolved. The article also stated that Sihanouk asked Krisher to give Cambodia a newspaper; in fact, he asked Krisher to help rehabilitate the country. Lastly, the article said that two alumni of </em>The Cambodia Daily<em> won Pulitzer Prizes. Only one did. We regret the errors.</em></small></p><p><small><em>Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.</em></small></p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJohn CuneoWhen the Presses Stop2017-12-08T08:00:00-05:002017-12-16T17:45:31-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:39-546563Bernie Krisher helped bring free journalism to Cambodia. Now, as the country reverts to autocracy, his paper has been shut down. Will he survive the heartbreak? Will Cambodia?<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">It was the hippies </span>who drove Nancy Hale over the edge. She had spent three days listening respectfully to the real people of Middle America, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer.</p><p style="background-color: #333; color: #fff; padding: 12px 24px;"><iframe frameborder="no" height="20" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/348839584&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;inverse=true&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_user=true" style="background-color: #333" width="100%"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">To hear more feature stories, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=feed" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">see our full list</a> or <a href="https://goo.gl/ERK95W" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">get the Audm iPhone app.</a> </i></p><p>She turned off the tape recorder and took several deep breaths, leaning back in the passenger seat of the rented GMC Yukon. The sun had just come out from behind a mass of clouds, casting a gleam on the rain-soaked parking lot in rural Wisconsin.</p><p>Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.</p><p>The trip was predicated on the optimistic notion that if Americans would only listen to each other, they would find more that united than divided them. This notion—the idea that, beyond our polarized politics, lies a middle, or third, path on which most can come together in agreement—is Third Way’s raison d’etre<strong>. </strong>It is premised on the idea that partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to meet in the middle.</p><p>But these are not uncontested assumptions. And, three days into their safari in flyover country, the researchers were hearing some things that disturbed them greatly—sentiments that threatened their beliefs to the very core.</p><p>The last focus group, a bunch of back-to-the-land organic farmers and artisanal small-businesspeople, was over, and the researchers had retreated to their car to debrief. There was a long pause after Hale turned off the tape recorder on which they were recording their impressions.</p><p>“I had a very hard time with that meeting,” she finally said. “The longer the meeting went on, the more it started to feel to me like just another community that had isolated itself, and it was right and everybody else wasn’t, you know?” The hippies should have been her kind of people, but the attitudes they’d expressed had offended her sense of the way America ought to be. She had come seeking mutual understanding, only to find that some people were not the least bit interested in meeting in the middle. And now she was at a crossroads: Would she have to revise her whole worldview to account for this troubling reality?</p><p>Third Way’s researchers are far from the only Americans inspired to undertake anthropological journeys in the past year. Nearly a year after Donald Trump’s election shocked the prognosticators, ivory-tower types are still sifting through the wreckage. Group after group of befuddled elites has crisscrossed America to poke and prod and try to figure out what they missed—“Margaret Meads among the Samoans,” one prominent strategist remarked to me. </p><p><em>HuffPo</em> <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/13/huffington-post-middle-america-240476">embarked</a> on a 23-city bus tour to get to know places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Odessa, Texas. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-hits-the-road-to-meet-regular-folkswith-a-few-conditions-1499873098?mod=trending_now_2">undertook</a> a series of carefully choreographed interactions with factory workers and people on tractors. The liberal pollster Stan Greenberg appeared at the National Press Club to discuss his findings from a series of focus groups with “Obama-Trump” voters in Macomb County, Michigan. A new group of Democratic elected officials <a href="http://newdemocracy.net/events/winning-back-heartland/">hosted</a> a “Winning Back the Heartland” strategy conference in Des Moines this month. The title of yet another research project, a bipartisan study underwritten by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, <a href="http://democracyfundvoice.org/stranger-in-my-own-country/">encapsulates</a> the sentiment: “Stranger in My Own Country.”</p><p>Third Way, for its part, <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/newsroom/press-releases/third-way-launches-20-million-new-blue-campaign-to-battle-trumpism-will-provide-democrats-with-a-path-out-of-the-wilderness">announced</a> in January it would spend $20 million on what it called the “New Blue” campaign to “provide Democrats with a path out of the wilderness.” Like many of their peers, the think tank’s brain trust had been stunned by the election. On November 9, too devastated to work, its staff had simply sat together and cried.</p><p>For all intents and purposes, it was Third Way’s vision that had been on the ballot in 2016—and lost. The think tank, inspired by the New Democrat centrism of the 1990s, had advised Hillary Clinton on her 2016 policy platform. In debates within the Democratic Party, Third Way advocated for the sensible center. It argued that a left-wing platform could not win elections, and that what voters preferred was a pragmatic, moderate, technocratic philosophy, socially liberal but pro-business and wary of big government. It used research and data to demonstrate that these policies made good politics.</p><p>After the electoral-college majority unexpectedly rejected Clinton and the Democrats, Third Way, in characteristic fashion, set out to research the problem and find a solution. Its data wonks got to work crunching demographic information. But its leaders were well aware that their statistics—everything the professional know-it-alls thought they knew—had failed to predict 2016. Data alone would not suffice.</p><p>And so Hale and her colleagues began a series of visits to targeted areas, including this one, Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, which had voted Democratic for more than two decades—until it swung more than 15 points for Trump. I was allowed to ride along on the condition that I not identify any of the focus-group participants. I was hoping to use the trip as my own focus group of sorts: I wanted to get a sense of what 2017’s many delegations of liberal anthropologists were hearing from Trump Country.</p><p>I wondered if any of the tourists from the coasts would be open-minded enough to absorb a reality that might cut against their preconceptions. Did Third Way and Zuckerberg and <em>Huffpo</em> and all the rest want to confront an angry and divided nation head-on, or would they settle for a series of earnest exchanges that left their core assumptions intact?</p><p>Open-mindedness was the sworn commitment of the Third Way team. The researchers were determined to approach rural Wisconsin with humility and respect. After the election, Hale told me, “You heard people saying, ‘These people aren’t smart enough to vote, they’re so stupid, if that’s what they want, they deserve what they get.’ That hit us, on every level, as wrong.” They wanted to open their hearts and their minds and simply listen. They were certain that, in doing so, they would find what they believed was true: a bunch of reasonable, thoughtful, patriotic Americans. A nation of people who really wanted to get along.</p><p class="dropcap">O<span class="smallcaps">ur tour of western Wisconsin</span> had begun two days earlier, at an imposing courthouse in the rural county seat of Ellsworth, the self-proclaimed “cheese curd capital of Wisconsin.” A farmer in the group told Third Way’s eager listeners he knew exactly what was wrong with America: his fellow Americans.</p><p>“You’ve got all these parasites making a living off the bureaucracy,” the farmer declared, “like leeches pulling you down, bleeding you dry.” We had been in the state for just a few hours, and already the researchers’ quest for mutual understanding seemed to be hitting a snag.</p><p>Others in the group, a bunch of proudly curmudgeonly older white men, identified other culprits. There were plenty of jobs, a local elected official and business owner said. But today’s young people were too lazy or drug-addled to do them.</p><p>As we proceeded to meetings with diverse groups of community representatives, this sort of blame-casting was a common refrain. Disdain for the young, in particular, was a constant, across demographic, socio-economic, and generational lines: Even young people complained about young people. “They don’t want to do the work, and they always feel like they’re being picked on,” a recent graduate of a technical school in Chippewa Falls said of his fellow Millennials.</p><p>Some of the people we met expressed the conservative-leaning view that changes in society and the family were to blame. One, a technical-skills instructor at the Chippewa Falls school, questioned whether women belonged in the workplace at all. “That idea of both family members working, it’s a social experiment that I don’t know if it quite works,” he said. “If everyone’s working, who is making sure the children are raised right?”</p><p>Others expressed more liberal-minded sentiments, seeing insufficient government action as the root of the community’s problems. A school-board official cried as she described the problems plaguing education. A group of middle-class women who met through local activism lamented the area’s lack of diversity and hidden pockets of poverty.</p><p>Politics, though, was not the focus of the Third Way interviewers, who believed there was more to be gained by asking neutral, open-ended questions. In accordance with Third Way’s ideology, they believed that political partisanship was not most people’s primary concern. But sometimes the Wisconsinites brought up politics anyway.</p><p>At the Labor Temple Lounge in Eau Claire, nine gruff, tough-looking union men sat around a table. One had the acronym of his guild, the Laborers International Union of North America, tattooed on a bulging bicep. The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOP’s fault. A member of the bricklayers’ union lamented Walker’s cuts to public services: “If we can’t help each other,” he said, “what are we, a pack of wolves—we eat the weakest one? It’s shameful.”</p><p>But their negativity toward Republicans didn’t translate to rosy feelings for the Democrats, who, they said, too frequently ignored working-class people. And some of the blame, they said, fell on their fellow workers, many of whom supported Republicans against their own interests. “The membership”—the union rank-and-file—“voted for these Republicans because of them damn guns,” a Laborers Union official said. “You cannot push it out of their head. A lot of ‘em loved it when Walker kicked our ass.”</p><p>Debriefing after this particular group, the Third Way listeners said they found the union men demoralizing. “I feel like they can’t see their way out,” Hale said.</p><p>“They were very negative,” Paul Neaville, another researcher, concurred.</p><p>They were so fixated on blaming Republicans, Hale fretted. “It was very us-and-them.”</p><p>On the long drives between stops, I asked the researchers about their views and what they had been hearing around the country. They admitted that some of the things they had heard had shocked them. In South Florida, Hale told me, a local chamber of commerce official had calmly asserted, “We don’t have any Muslims here, and that’s a good thing, because Muslims are trouble.”</p><p>Hale, a tall woman with a breathy voice and a mop of curly red hair, had come to Wisconsin fresh off a silent Zen meditation retreat in California. She had spent her career building organizations and training activists to work for social change. Instinctively warm and curious, she easily struck up conversations with strangers and often ended interactions with hugs. Hers was a politics of empathy, she told me. “Whether you’re talking about nonviolence or feminism, it’s really the same idea: Everybody matters,” she said. </p><p>When she heard views that challenged her sense of empathy—Muslims were bad, welfare recipients were leeches, women should not have careers outside the home—Hale reminded herself that she was there to listen, not to judge. “People have said stuff I was surprised to hear them say out loud,” Hale told me. “But we have to learn from that, too. Whatever they believe is true, because it’s true for them.”</p><p>Part of the point of the Wisconsin trip was to gather the evidence that would help them advance this agenda in intra-party debates. Understanding the mysterious ways of the elusive Trump voter had become the crucial currency of any political discussion. The face-to-face interactions they were having in Wisconsin, Hale said as we drove, were so much more valuable than any of the data-driven reports they customarily churned out for their “customers”—donors, elected officials, and the Democratic National Committee.</p><p>We sped from town to town in the rented Yukon, watching the exotic Middle American landscape fly by. At one point, a gaggle of bikers roared past us on one side. On the other side of the road, a bright-green field dotted with hay bales passed by. Looking at the bales, Hale mused, “Don’t they look like shredded wheat?”</p><p class="dropcap">H<span class="smallcaps">ale or her colleague Luke Watson</span>, Third Way’s deputy director of strategy, began each Wisconsin focus group with a variation on the same refrain.</p><p>“We are a think tank that deals with what the plurality of Americans are thinking about—in other words, we don’t spend a lot of time on the ideological edges,” one of the two would explain. “It has started seeming like the far left and the far right were the only voice in America, but we know that’s not true. We focus on the 70 percent in the middle, because we think most of us, as Americans, are there.”</p><p>This was slightly disingenuous. Third Way, while not officially affiliated with a party, is an organization with a policy agenda, from gun control to entitlement reform, that it seeks to advance within the Democratic Party and with the broader public. Most of its funding comes from corporations and financial executives. Critics on the left call the group the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, and accuse it of advancing its donors’ interests over the greater political good. Third Way has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare and vehemently attacked the soak-the-rich economic populism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Voters, it claims, are not interested in a party that’s all about big government and tax-and-spend.</p><p>This debate between left and center has consumed the Democratic Party as it looks for a way forward after the debacle of 2016. Leftists claim that Hillary Clinton’s technocratic caution and coziness with Goldman Sachs alienated voters, and that Sanders, had he won the Democratic nomination, could have defeated Trump. Third Way makes the case that its brand of neoliberal centrism is still the party’s best hope.</p><p>Hale and Watson’s opening remarks to focus groups were an honest statement of the group’s animating worldview: that all things are possible when politicians make the right sales pitch to a fundamentally reasonable electorate that can agree on a lot of things. That in a time of division, they could find the things that still bound Americans together. That with enough research and focus groups and listening tours and charts and graphs, they could figure out—and cure—what ails the body politic.</p><p>It was a thesis that would not go unchallenged, even in flyover country. In rural Wisconsin, it turns out, the natives have Google.</p><p>We had come to the final stop on our listening tour, and the hippies were wary. Viroqua, a town of less than 5,000 people, has in recent years become home to a tiny progressive community. Earnest college graduates toil on organic farms; a “folk school” offers classes in sustainable living, from rabbit butchering to basket-weaving. Migrants from the likes of Madison and Berkeley are attracted to a rural idyll of food and electric co-ops, alternative schools, and locally sourced everything.</p><p>“Isn’t this underwritten by the DNC?” a local cafe owner asked Watson after his just-here-to-listen opening spiel. “I read somewhere you’re spending $20 million,” another man said. Another participant asked about corporate donors.</p><p>This was all pretty much true—Third Way, not the DNC, was paying for the project, but the “New Blue” campaign was hardly a nonpartisan effort. But Watson tried to deflect. He acknowledged that the session was “part of” the $20 million project, but he insisted it had nothing to do with any political party. “This is not about Democrats or Republicans—it’s about what’s going on beyond the Beltway,” he said.</p><p>With those concerns dispatched, the listening began in earnest. The Viroqua representatives were eager to extol the virtues of their community. It was an oasis of sanity, an organic farmer in a pink-and-blue plaid shirt said—unlike the dismal city where he’d grown up. “There was no culture with which to identify, just television, drinking, maybe sports,” he said. “There’s nothing to aspire to. You’re just going through life with a case of Mountain Dew in your car.”</p><p>The cafe owner—a bearded man in a North Face fleece—had recently attended a town hall held by the local Democratic congressman, Ron Kind, a Third Way stalwart and former chair of the House’s centrist New Democrat Coalition. “I’m not, like, a jumping-up-and-down Berniecrat,” the man said. “But what you see in these congressional meetings is a refusal to even play ball” with ideas considered too extreme, like single-payer health care. “All these centrist ideals,” he said, “are just perpetuating a broken system.”</p><p>This was a direct attack on the very premise of Third Way’s existence. These were not the ideas of the middle 70 percent. These were not the voices of an America that wanted to find mutual understanding with its neighbors. They were, essentially, separatists, proud of their extremism and disdainful of the unenlightened.</p><p>It was after this exchange that Hale, after she and Watson got back into the Yukon to debrief, as they did after every session in order to compose their eventual after-action report, had to stop and vent. Her problem wasn’t that people were wrong. She had managed to maintain her equanimity while hearing other groups express opinions she disagreed with. It was that they <em>didn’t want to get along</em>.</p><p>“I have so much hope, and it’s gotten kind of shaken from both ends, you know?” she said. “There’s an, I don’t know, blue-sky part of me that was like, ‘I’m going to go traveling around the country and see that we’re more about commonalities than differences, that we’re more about our desire to be together than to be separate.’ And I’m not saying that isn’t true. I’m just saying every once in a while it gets kicked in the ass.”</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">hat moment of doubt </span>does not appear in the <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/report/wisconsin-district-visit">report</a> that Third Way released, which distills the group’s conclusions from the tour I joined. In the report, there is only one quotation from the hippie roundtable in Viroqua—a man who extols the area’s turnaround, in a section about the area’s “intense local pride.” “There’s love, beauty, and a sense of opportunity,” he is quoted as saying. “There’s been a rejuvenation of identity.”</p><p>In the moment, Hale had heard sentiments like this as disturbing, of a piece with the community’s self-satisfied separatism. In the report, it had been made to sound like a paean to localism.</p><p>The report surprised me when I read it. Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way. We had heard people blame each other for their own difficulties, take refuge in tribalism, and appeal to extremes. But the report mentioned little of that. Instead it described the prevailing attitude as “an intense work ethic that binds the community together and helps it adapt to change.” (Third Way disputes these characterizations of its <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/report/wisconsin-district-visit">report</a>.)</p><p>This supposedly universal belief in the value of hard work was the researchers’ principal finding from their trip to Wisconsin. “It is their North Star, guiding their sense of what is right and wrong, inside and outside of WI-3,” the report states. In the face of challenges, from school budget cuts to factory closures, the community had responded “with a fierce work ethic and a no-nonsense attitude.”</p><p>We had certainly heard some of that, but it wasn’t all we heard. In many cases, the report presents only one side of an issue about which we’d heard varying views. For example, it quotes a local employer who sang the praises of automation, but none of the union members who worried about jobs disappearing. It quotes a technical-college instructor proclaiming that crises in the education system create opportunities, but none of the public-school teachers who saw their classrooms gutted by voucher programs.</p><p>The report is short, covering only three big takeaways from the seven listening sessions Third Way conducted. The first is the importance of hard work; the second is the need for a strong workforce. The third, described in a section entitled “Just Get the Hell Out of My Way,” is locals’ purported antagonism to big government. “Whether the question is about immigration or banks, taxes or welfare, the people we spoke to generally felt that government policies were irrelevant to their daily lives,” it states. This view is made to sound like one that was broadly expressed, but in fact, we mostly heard it in just one session—the group of curmudgeonly farmers. Almost all of the quotations in this section are drawn from that group. There are no quotations from the people we met who were pro-government, such as the teachers and laborers and activists, who voiced concern that local, state, and federal government ought to be doing more to take care of people.</p><p>According to the report, the community’s “biggest frustrations” are “laggard government and partisan squabbling.” “The idea that such bickering can be tolerated in D.C. is appalling to most,” it states. The good people of western Wisconsin, Third Way found, wanted nothing so much as a society where people could put aside their differences. The report quotes a man who said, “We come together on projects and solve problems together.” It doesn’t quote any of the Wisconsinites we met who expressed partisan sentiments or questioned the prospect of consensus.</p><p>The researchers had somehow found their premise perfectly illustrated. Their journey to Trump’s America had done nothing to unsettle their preconceptions.</p><p>The Wisconsin report is the second Third Way has produced from its listening tour; still to come are its findings from Florida and Arizona. The group’s first <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/memo/the-quad-cities-can-you-hear-me-now">report</a>, on a trip to northwest Illinois, was quite a bit more pessimistic, with more emphasis on the decline of manufacturing, and more skepticism expressed about trade and immigration. Still, the Illinois report did, in the end, come to many of the same conclusions about what drove people: love of work and community, concern for the future, distrust of big government, and a desire to move past partisanship. Validating the researchers’ project, the Illinois report also found that Midwesterners felt overlooked in the national political dialogue. It quotes a local as complaining, “The coasts think we’re Jesusland or Dumbasfuckistan.” </p><p>In Wisconsin, I had seen and heard everything the Third Way researchers did—and eaten at the same restaurants, and slept at the same Hampton Inn in Eau Claire, and watched the same landscape roll by the windows of the same SUV. I heard all the optimism they did, but I also heard its opposite: that one side was right and that the other was the enemy; that other Americans, not just the government, were to blame for the country’s problems. There’s plenty of fellow-feeling in the heartland for those who want to see it, but there’s plenty of division, too. And not every problem can be solved in a way that splits the difference.</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he other groups of anthropologists </span>roaming Middle America face the same quandary. Having gotten the country drastically wrong, they have set out on well-meaning missions to bring the country together by increasing mutual understanding. They share Third Way’s basic assumption that mutual understanding is something Americans can agree to find desirable. But as hard as they try to open their minds to new perspectives, are they ready to have that basic assumption challenged?</p><p>The researchers I rode with had dived into the heart of America with the best of intentions and the openest of minds. They believed that their only goal was to emerge with a better understanding of their country. And yet the conclusions they drew from what they heard corresponded only roughly to what I heard. Instead, they seemed to revert to their preconceptions, squeezing their findings into the same old mold. It seems possible, if not likely, that all the other delegations of earnest listeners are returning with similarly comforting, selective lessons. If the aim of such tours is to find new ways to bring the country together, or new political messages for a changed electorate, the chances of success seem remote as long as even the sharpest researchers are only capable of seeing what they want to see.</p><p>The last time I spoke to Nancy Hale, she was off on another Third Way trip, this one to southern Arizona. At a hotel in Tucson, preparing for her next discussion with a group of young immigration activists, she reflected on what a valuable experience the listening tour had been. “I’ve come to the conclusion that most of our divisions have to do with lack of understanding,” she told me. “And I don’t mean in some kind of academic way, I mean in a very human way. I know it’s very unpopular to say there are any benefits of the recent election, but people seem to be moving more toward that.”</p><p>There was another way the tour had been valuable: As Third Way argued its preferred course for the Democratic Party, its on-the-ground research was already lending crucial credibility to its claims, she said. In meetings with Democratic elected officials and presentations to the DNC, Hale told me, Third Way’s representatives could reel off anecdote after anecdote about the Real People of Middle America they’d met. “The fact that we now have this very direct experience that we can use to tell a story—we get listened to in a different way, because we’ve figured out a better way to say it,” Hale told me. I had no doubt this was true—that Beltway Democrats were eagerly swallowing Third Way’s claims, bolstered by their firsthand accounts of the mysterious heartland. Since the Wisconsin trip, Third Way has published an <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/report/how-to-build-a-house-majority">analysis</a> claiming the Democratic Party cannot win back the House if it focuses on its base and ignores working-class whites, and <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/report/get-to-work-democrats-become-the-jobs-party">another</a> that says the party’s main problem is that “Americans don’t see Democrats as the party of jobs.”</p><p>What stuck with her above all, Hale told me, was how grateful people were to the researchers for hearing them. “The things people end up saying to us are really kind of miraculous considering that, five minutes before, they had never met us,” she said. “I think that has to do with us saying, <em>This matters. You are the democracy. You matter</em>.”</p><p>It was gratifying to Nancy Hale to find, in the end, that America wasn’t lost. To be sure, there had been moments that made her wonder. But as she looked back on it, she had managed to edit those moments out of her memory. The American people, she concluded, were not as divided and irreconcilable as the election made them seem. Progressive neoliberalism was not a lost cause. The world she believed in before—the world she preferred to inhabit—was the one she and her fellow American explorers had managed to find: not a strange land at all but a reassuring one.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedFuse / Getty / Tanner Boriack / Peter Kleinau / Nicolas Barbier Garreau / Rachel Lees / Unsplash / Katie Martin / The AtlanticOn Safari in Trump's America2017-10-23T09:54:47-04:002017-11-16T11:28:29-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543288The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?<p>J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling memoir <em>Hillbilly Elegy</em>, strongly considered seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio next year, but has decided against a run, he said Thurdsay.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p>Vance, whose book describes his drug-addicted mother and absentee father in unsparing detail, concluded a run for office would put too much strain on his young family. His wife, Usha, a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, recently gave birth to their first child.</p><p>“I felt like I had to take a serious look at it because I care about the direction of the party, and people I respect encouraged me to run,” Vance told me. “But it would have been an objectively bad call for my family.”</p><p>A Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate, Vance, 33, voted for independent candidate <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-defector/528714/?utm_source=feed">Evan McMullin</a> over President Trump. But his intensely personal account of the resentment and isolation of poor, white Americans was seen as a window into the cultural forces that helped propel Trump in Appalachia.</p><p><em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hillbilly-elegy-made-jd-vance-the-voice-of-the-rust-belt-but-does-he-want-that-job/2017/02/06/fa6cd63c-e882-11e6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html?utm_term=.c70b5e4bc2bc">called him</a> “the Rust Belt anger translator.” Hillary Clinton <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hillary-clinton-writes-that-jd-vance-was-right-hillbillies-lost-me-my-election/article/2634117">cites</a> him in her new memoir. The book, subtitled “a memoir of a family and a culture in crisis,” has sold more than a million copies since its release and has spent more than a year on <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> bestseller list. Some Democrats <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-grew-up-in-poverty-in-appalachia-jd-vances-hillbilly-elegy-doesnt-speak-for-me/2017/08/30/734abb38-891d-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story.html?utm_term=.4c02664d96db">charge</a> that the book puts too much blame on the poor for their choices and is overly dismissive of government-based solutions.</p><p>Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, is seeking a third term in 2018. His main Republican challenger at this point is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/is-josh-mandel-the-next-marco-rubio/253956/?utm_source=feed">Josh Mandel</a>, the state treasurer, who ran a losing campaign against Brown in 2012. But Republicans in the state are leery of Mandel’s <a href="https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/657933?unlock=RKX4483H4PPH3ICV">retread bid</a>, particularly in a year that could be difficult for the GOP. Mandel’s reputation has been dented by scandals and inflammatory statements, such as when the candidate, who is Jewish, blasted the Anti-Defamation League for criticizing figures it associated with the white nationalist “alt-right” movement.</p><p>Vance had been working for the Trump-supporting Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel before moving to Columbus, Ohio, earlier this year to found a nonprofit. “It was an effort to do something with the momentum I had from the book and start thinking about solutions,” he said. His interest in policy issues led him to Jai Chabria, a former political adviser to Ohio Governor John Kasich, who helped introduce him to local and national political players and donors.</p><p>Vance said he began to seriously consider becoming a candidate when he saw the way his message resonated with both the elite and grass roots of the GOP. “I’m a conservative, but I think the party has really lost touch with working- and middle-class Americans,” he told me. In speeches to groups as varied as the Allen &amp; Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the Lucas County Republican Party, in Toledo, “this thunderous critique of Republicans for being the party of the rich was surprisingly getting a lot of applause, even in rooms full of rich people. That made me think I should take [running] more seriously.”</p><p>Chabria, the political consultant, said audiences were “spellbound” by the combination of Vance’s timely message and personal charisma, even though many had no idea who he was. “I haven’t seen a reaction like that, to someone that people didn’t know, ever,” he said.</p><p>Local and national donors expressed enthusiasm. Vance commissioned a poll that tested his viability in the Republican primaries for both governor and Senate. He was particularly concerned that his opposition to Trump would turn off base GOP voters. But the poll led him to conclude that that would not pose a significant problem and that he would be a viable candidate, particularly in the Senate race. “Based on the polling we had done and the backing we had, it was very clear that J.D. would have been the Republican nominee,” a person familiar with Vance’s decision told me.</p><p>A Vance candidacy would have posed an intriguing test of a new sort of Republican populism, one that combined Trump’s critique of the GOP elite with the reformist vision of conservative thinkers like Yuval Levin (and without Trump’s divisive rhetoric). In a recent <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/opinion/trumpcare-obamacare-solutions.html?mcubz=0">op-ed</a>, Vance argued that Republicans must be willing to financially support Americans who would lose their health insurance in a repeal or reform of Obamacare.</p><p>But the president’s unpopularity and erratic governing style make it a difficult time to be an idealistic young Republican prospect, even in a state that went for Trump by eight points. For now, Vance will occupy himself with his work as a writer and commentator; an <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/06/26/jd-vance-steve-case-want-heartlands-start-up-pitches/103105054/">investment project</a> with the AOL co-founder Steve Case; his nascent nonprofit; and his family.</p><p>“You can’t sacrifice your family’s happiness to run for political office,” Vance told me. “If you’re willing to do that, you don’t belong in elected office and you don't deserve your family.”</p><p>Though Vance decided the time wasn’t ripe, Chabria is convinced he has a future in politics. “I have never seen someone that has as much upside as he does,” Chabria told me. “I know he’s going to be relevant in a lot of different ways, because the party needs people like him.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedLloyd Bishop / NBC<i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> Writer Won't Seek Office2017-09-14T21:42:00-04:002017-09-15T10:47:38-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-539949J.D. Vance, whose memoir of rural white resentment helped explain Trump’s rise, seriously considered a bid for U.S. Senate in his home state of Ohio.<p>Five years ago, President Obama ordered that young illegal immigrants be protected from deportation, a program known as DACA. As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to rescind that protection. He could have done it on his first day in office—but he didn’t, and still hasn’t, for reasons no one quite understands.</p><p>Now, President Trump appears poised to revoke DACA. The action has not been officially announced, and administration sources believe that the impulsive president’s mind is not totally made up, but he is <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/31/trump-expected-to-announce-end-to-obama-era-daca-official-says.html">reportedly</a> planning to do so as soon as Friday.</p><p>If he does, he will have effectively been boxed in by immigration restrictionists—potentially against his own better political judgment. “I do not think Trump wants to do this,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told me. “But they’ve cornered him. This artificial deadline has created the moment the opposition needed to force a decision.”</p><p>Immigration policy is the battleground for the White House’s warring factions, and DACA is ground zero. Around 750,000 undocumented youths now benefit from the program, which allows them to work and go to school without fear of deportation. Allowing the so-called “Dreamers” to stay is broadly popular <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2017/06/16/poll-trumps-decision-dreamers-popular-one-even-among-base/">even with Trump’s base</a>: Nearly 80 percent of Republicans, and three-quarters of Trump voters, support it. But immigration hardliners like the pundit Ann Coulter, <em>Breitbart</em>, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been vocal proponents of ending the policy.</p><p>It is something of a mystery why Trump hasn’t ended it already. In campaign speeches, he vowed to “immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties,” meaning DACA and a subsequent action to protect Dreamers’ relatives that was blocked by the courts. Immigrant advocates braced for the White House to cancel the permits as early as Inauguration Day.</p><p>An executive order was <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-daca-20170216-story.html?int=lat_digitaladshouse_bx-modal_acquisition-subscriber_ngux_display-ad-interstitial_bx-bonus-story_______">reportedly drafted</a> to do so—but Trump wouldn’t sign it. Instead, he waffled. He repeatedly expressed public sympathy for the Dreamers, even as he issued draconian immigration policies on other fronts: a ban on travelers from certain Muslim countries, for example, and an unrelenting crusade for a wall on the Southern border. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has continued to give two-year permits to Dreamers. About 200,000 have enrolled in the program or renewed their enrollment since Trump took office.</p><p>“We don’t want to hurt those kids,” Trump told Democrat Richard Durbin at an Inauguration Day lunch with congressional leaders. At a February news conference, he said, “DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me,” and promised to handle it “with heart” for “these incredible kids.” In an April <a href="https://apnews.com/d4ea9fbaf2ad439bb657ecdf07e31ebe?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&amp;utm_source=Twitter&amp;utm_medium=AP">interview</a>, he said Dreamers should “rest easy,” even though some of them have already been detained.</p><p>The president’s failure to pull the trigger infuriated and perplexed his friends in the immigration-restriction community, who felt he was breaking a promise. “DACA is inconsistent with the rule of law, inconsistent with the president’s own promises, and inconsistent with the president’s principled stand against illegal immigration,” the Kansas secretary of state and national immigration crusader Kris Kobach <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/30/kobach-the-daca-amnesty-must-be-ended/">wrote</a> in a <em>Breitbart</em> op-ed this week. “It must end.”</p><p>Why didn’t Trump do it? It’s not as if anyone could accuse him of having a soft spot for immigrants. He’s amply demonstrated that he’s not particularly concerned with offending Latino voters, or doing things that polls show are unpopular, or disrupting the status quo, or upsetting the business community or Republican establishment. So why not end DACA?</p><p>The best <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/30/trump-immigration-dreamers-242152">explanation</a>, and the one proffered by sources in, around, and opposed to the White House, is the one the president himself has <a href="https://apnews.com/21ee146bb33241739f89b358347f0145">given</a>: He feels for the Dreamers. As with other controversial administration policies, a moderate-establishment wing of the White House opposes the change, while a populist-conservative faction is pushing Trump to make it. Trump himself feels pulled in both directions.</p><p>More than one immigration advocate put it the same way to me: “Somebody told him these are good kids,” and it stuck. He didn’t want to anger the <em>Breitbart</em> wing of his base. But unlike other undocumented immigrants, hardworking young students didn’t strike him as criminals. And in an administration where personality is policy, Trump’s feelings carried the day.</p><p>The hardliners weren’t satisfied, and when they realized the White House wasn’t going to act, they sought to force Trump’s hand. A group of Republican attorneys general brought the 2014 lawsuit that prevented Obama from protecting Dreamers’ relatives. That suit is still pending; in June, a group led by the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, <a href="https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/DACA_letter_6_29_2017.pdf?cachebuster:5">announced</a> they would amend the lawsuit to also attack DACA if the administration hadn’t revoked the policy by September 5.</p><p>Immigration advocates suspect that Trump was trying to keep DACA in place without affirmatively supporting it—but the attorneys general called his bluff. “At least until right now, the president kept the status quo and kept DACA going, allowing roughly 200,000 renewals,” said Todd Schulte, president of the immigration-reform group FWD.us. “That was absolutely the right decision. Now, we have clearly seen people outside the administration try to jam him.”</p><p>The imposition of this arbitrary deadline has forced a decision. If Trump doesn’t act and the lawsuit goes forward, a conservative judge might try to halt the program, but the courts would probably allow DACA to continue while it’s being litigated. Experts differ on whether the program would ultimately pass legal muster—Obama himself repeatedly insisted he didn’t have the power to take such an action before reversing himself.</p><p>The immigration hardliners in the administration are working to convince the president that DACA will inevitably end, so he <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article170463687.html">might as well</a> “take the credit” for it. All week, anonymously sourced reports have portrayed revocation as a done deal. But the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that there would be no decision today, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the decision had “not been finalized.” While many are bracing for a late-Friday newsbreak, sources around and in contact with the White House believe the president still hasn’t made up his mind.</p><p>If Trump does announce he’s ending DACA, he would provoke an immediate firestorm. Even under the “phaseout” the administration has floated—allowing recipients’ permits to run out without issuing new ones or renewals—thousands of undocumented youths would <a href="https://dreamers.fwd.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/20170823-DACA-Job-Loss-Report.pdf">begin to lose </a>protected status on an ongoing basis.</p><p>“You are talking about 5,000 to 10,000 kids every week losing work authorization, becoming undocumented, and being subject to immigration enforcement and deportation,” said Tyler Moran, managing director of the D.C. Immigration Hub, a strategy center for pro-immigration groups. (The hub is funded by the Emerson Collective, which is in the process of acquiring a majority stake in <em>The Atlantic</em>.)</p><p>The Trump administration has eliminated the Obama administration’s prioritization system for deportations, meaning every unauthorized immigrant is a potential target. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already reportedly sought to get its hands on the names and addresses of those registered for DACA. And meanwhile, thanks to Hurricane Harvey, a major city in Dreamer-heavy Texas is underwater. Houston is among the nation’s top five cities for DACA recipients.</p><p>Beyond the humanitarian effects, eliminating DACA would be a crisis for the business community and a public-relations nightmare for the administration and Congress. Trump has come under heavy pressure not to do it in recent days—in personal calls from senior Republican lawmakers and business heavy hitters, and in a full-court press from activists across the political spectrum, such as a Wednesday <a href="http://evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/eit-dreamer-letter-8-30-2017/">letter</a> signed by numerous leading conservative evangelical Christians.</p><p>“Donald Trump is driving the Republican Party into the one place they tried to avoid—being blamed for the government hunting down and deporting kids,” a liberal immigration advocate told me. “He’s pointing a gun at his own head: ‘I’m going to shut down the government unless I get a border wall, and then I’m going to start deporting Dreamers!’”</p><p>But immigration restrictionists, of course, will rejoice if Trump revokes DACA. They will have effectively forced Trump to keep his promise to them—apparently against his own preferences. “He’s been on the record countless times [in favor of] DACA, and now he’s forfeited leadership on the issue,” a conservative immigration-reform advocate told me. “Shouldn’t he be [upset] about that?”</p><p>The ACLU, among many other observers, suspects that Trump’s own attorney general played a role in the conservative AGs’ scheme to box Trump in. The civil-rights group has filed a <a href="https://www.aclusc.org/en/cases/freedom-information-act-request-daca">public-records request</a> to see whether the Department of Justice coordinated with the state attorneys to create next week’s deadline. In a June interview on Fox News, Sessions, who was the leading voice for cracking down on illegal immigration when he was in the Senate, said he welcomed the states’ lawsuit: “I like it that our states and localities are holding the federal government to account, expecting us to do what is our responsibility to the state and locals, and that is to enforce the law.” If the suit does go forward, many expect Sessions’s DOJ would not defend DACA, but other groups would intervene to do so.</p><p>Most Republican lawmakers desperately do not want to deal with this issue given their already-packed fall legislative calendar. But if there is a bright side to this crisis for DACA proponents, it is that Congress might finally bring itself to provide what the activists have always sought: a permanent, legislative solution for the Dreamers.</p><p>“Republicans are going to be on the hook for this. They control the House and Senate. It’s going to be their problem to solve,” said Moran, who worked on immigration in the Obama White House and on the staff of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. If you want to protect Dreamers, “There’s nothing else you can do except pass the bill.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / ReutersImmigration activists rally in Washington to demand the Trump administration protect the DACA program earlier this month.How Immigration Hardliners Are Forcing Trump's Hand on DACA2017-08-31T16:59:57-04:002017-09-01T12:24:30-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-538623The president appears poised to end the Obama administration’s protections for young illegal immigrants.<p>Roy Moore of Alabama has been twice elected to lead his state’s supreme court and twice thrown out of that position. The first time, in 2003, he refused to obey a federal court’s order to remove a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/10/roy-and-his-rock/304264/?utm_source=feed">monument of the Ten Commandments</a> from the courthouse in Montgomery. The voters of Alabama restored him, and in 2016, he was thrown off the bench again for refusing to implement the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage.</p><p>On Tuesday, a plurality of Alabama Republican voters picked Moore to be their candidate for U.S. Senate. With 99 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning, Moore had 39 percent of the vote to 33 percent for the incumbent, Luther Strange, and 20 percent for Representative Mo Brooks. Moore and Strange will now advance to a runoff election for the Republican nomination next month. The winner will proceed to a general election against the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, former federal prosecutor Doug Jones.</p><p>The first-place finish for the colorful Moore might not have even been the most remarkable aspect of the Republican primary, which played out as a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/between-trump-and-a-hard-place-in-alabama/536790/?utm_source=feed">fascinating allegory</a> of the GOP’s new fault lines in the uncharted territory of the Trump era.</p><p>The special election is being held because the Senate seat’s former occupant, Jeff Sessions, was appointed attorney general by President Trump. In February, the Republican governor, Robert Bentley, appointed Strange to fill the vacancy. The fact that Strange was, at the time, the state attorney general overseeing a criminal investigation of the very same same scandal-tarred governor who had given him his ticket to Washington made many Alabamans smell a rat. Despite the specter of a quid pro quo in the style of the former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, nothing was ever proven; Bentley subsequently resigned.</p><p>The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, made it a major priority to keep Strange—a former Washington lobbyist and reliable Republican vote—in the Senate. But two anti-establishment troublemakers entered the race against him. Moore, a stalwart of the local and national religious right, and a known quantity to Alabama voters, was one; Brooks, an archconservative member of the House Freedom Caucus who had chaired Ted Cruz’s Alabama campaign, was another.</p><p>Moore has his own brand in Alabama independent of the politics of the moment, a devoted band of followers who can be counted on to vote in GOP primaries. Local experts like to say he had a “high floor but a low ceiling”: Even in a primary, he would have a hard time broadening his appeal beyond his built-in base.</p><p>Brooks had the support of national conservatives like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, but wasn’t well known outside his North Alabama congressional district. He sought to turn the race into a referendum on the Washington GOP establishment, particularly McConnell—one of his final campaign events was a “Ditch Mitch” rally Monday night. But his ambivalent relationship with the president, whom he had criticized in the past, didn’t play well with Trump-loving Alabama Republican primary voters.</p><p>Brooks’s onetime antipathy for Trump was a major theme of the multimillion-dollar barrage of attack ads aired by Strange and his allies. (A source who polled the race told me Trump is viewed favorably by 68 percent of Alabama Republicans.) But the killing blow came a week before the election, when Trump unexpectedly endorsed Strange on Twitter—the first time the president has waded into a contested GOP primary. Trump apparently did it as a favor to McConnell—but then <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/between-trump-and-a-hard-place-in-alabama/536790/?utm_source=feed">went after McConnell</a> when he learned the majority leader had been patronizing him behind his back. Still, the president stuck with Strange, issuing more tweets and a recorded message in favor of the incumbent.</p><p>Trump’s popularity likely helped drag Strange across the finish line in second place. But it’s notable that his endorsement was only good enough for second place, and less than a third of the primary vote, for his favored candidate. Now Strange faces Moore one-on-one for the nomination, with Moore positioned as the outsider and Strange as the Washington candidate tainted by corruption.</p><p>McConnell’s allies have indicated that they intend to go hard against Moore, whose Bible-thumping ways do give many Alabamans pause—one Brooks voter I met told me it was hard enough telling out-of-staters you’re from Alabama without Moore underscoring outsiders’ stereotypes. “Here’s the question, what happens when McConnell &amp; Co. train their guns on Moore?” asked David Mowery, a Montgomery-based consultant who ran a Democratic campaign against Moore that nearly succeeded in 2012. “He is very, very hard to attack,” because of his reputation for standing on principle.</p><p>The Republican voters I met in Alabama had interesting perspectives on the embattled president. Nearly all supported Trump, but they were frequently vexed by his actions, and they were all offended when he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-standoff-between-trump-and-sessions-escalates/2017/07/25/5a51f3fc-7172-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?utm_term=.4ba47c10be47">hung Sessions out to dry</a> a few weeks ago. Several said they supported Trump’s agenda but not necessarily his behavior—more than one blamed his boorishness on his being a Yankee.</p><p>But the most important thing I learned was that these red-state voters, accurately perceiving the paralysis and dysfunction in Washington, didn’t hold Trump responsible for it. They blamed Republican leaders like McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan; they blamed the “swamp”; they blamed the establishment elements in Trump’s own orbit for getting in his way.</p><p>They said they wanted a senator who would exert leadership to get things done. But they saw a president who was already doing all he could.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedBrynn Anderson / Associated PressRoy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, rode his horse to the polls Tuesday to vote in the U.S. Senate primary. He finished first and heads to a runoff with the incumbent, Luther Strange.The Alabama Senate Race Gets Moore Strange2017-08-16T07:19:29-04:002017-08-16T15:19:56-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-537057A Bible-thumper and a tainted insider advance to the GOP runoff in an election that tested red-state Republican loyalties in the age of Trump.<p>Every day, the White House communications office sends official talking points to Republican members of Congress. These communiqués help the GOP stay on the same page (and, in the Trump era, help the embattled president’s allies come up with arguments in his defense).</p><p>On Tuesday evening, a few hours after the president’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/?utm_source=feed">inflammatory press conference</a> defending white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, the office issued an “evening communications briefing,” which was passed along to me by a Republican congressional aide. It encourages members to echo the president’s line, contending that “both sides … acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility.”</p><p>You can read the talking points in their entirety here. The links in the text are the White House’s. The briefing goes on to include a transcript of the president’s question-and-answer session with reporters at Trump Tower, followed by commentary on other issues.</p><blockquote type="cite">
<p align="center"><strong><u>NEWS OF THE DAY</u></strong></p>
<strong>Charlottesville</strong>
<ul><li>The President was entirely correct -- both sides of the violence in Charlottesville acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility.</li>
<li>Despite the criticism, the President reaffirmed some of our most important Founding principles: We are equal in the eyes of our Creator, equal under the law, and equal under our Constitution.
<ul><li>He has been a voice for unity and calm, encouraging the country to “rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that brings us together as Americans.”</li>
<li>He called for the end of violence on all sides so that no more innocent lives would be lost.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>The President condemned - with no ambiguity - the hate groups fueled by bigotry and racism over the weekend, and did so by name yesterday, but for the media that will never be enough.
<ul><li>The media reacted with hysteria to the notion that counter-protesters showed up with clubs spoiling for a fight, a fact that reporters on the ground have repeatedly stated.</li>
<li>Even a New York Times reporter <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://twitter.com/SherylNYT/status/896575560650035200&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502930321386000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHkuqfTiNCn_JbZT1GxK0dl-M0CwQ" href="https://twitter.com/SherylNYT/status/896575560650035200" target="_blank">tweeted</a> that she “saw club-wielding "antifa" beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”</li>
<li>The local ACLU chapter also tweeted that</li>
</ul></li>
<li>We should not overlook the facts just because the media finds them inconvenient:
<ul><li>From cop killing and violence at political rallies, to shooting at Congressmen at a practice baseball game, extremists on the left have engaged in terrible acts of violence.</li>
<li>The President is taking swift action to hold violent hate groups accountable.
<ul><li>The DOJ has opened a civil rights investigation into this weekend’s deadly car attack.</li>
<li>Last Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://ijr.com/2017/08/947008-charlottesville-ice-announces-unprecedented-prosecution-white-supremacists/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1502930321386000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEzLqwNZNPM-qoxgj0MCMj61vNtXw" href="http://ijr.com/2017/08/947008-charlottesville-ice-announces-unprecedented-prosecution-white-supremacists/" target="_blank">announced</a> it had completed the largest prosecution of white supremacists in the nation’s history.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul></li>
<li>Leaders and the media in our country should join the president in trying to unite and heal our country rather than incite more division.</li>
</ul><p>Transcript of President's Q&amp;A:</p>
<p>Q Mr. President, why do you think these CEOs are leaving your manufacturing council?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Because they're not taking their job seriously as it pertains to this country. And we want jobs, manufacturing in this country. If you look at some of those people that you're talking about they’re outside of the country, they're having a lot of their product made outsider. If you look at Merck as an example, take a look where -- excuse me, excuse me -- take a look at where their product is made. It's made outside of our country. We want products made in the country.</p>
<p> Now, I have to tell you, some of the folks that will leave, they're leaving out of embarrassment because they make their products outside. And I've been lecturing them, including the gentleman that you're referring to, about you have to bring it back to this country. You can't do it necessarily in Ireland and all of these other places. You have to bring this work back to this country. That's what I want. I want manufacturing to be back into the United States so that American workers can benefit.</p>
<p>Q Let me ask you, Mr. President, why did you wait so long to blast neo-Nazis?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t wait long.</p>
<p>Q You waited two days --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t wait long.</p>
<p>Q Forty-eight hours.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct -- not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement. But you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don’t know the facts. And it's a very, very important process to me, and it's a very important statement.</p>
<p> So I don’t want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts. If you go back to --</p>
<p>Q So you had to (inaudible) white supremacists?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I brought it. I brought it. I brought it.</p>
<p>Q Was it terrorism, in your opinion, what happened?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: As I said on -- remember, Saturday -- we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America. And then it went on from there.</p>
<p> Now, here's the thing --</p>
<p>Q (Inaudible) many sides.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. Excuse me. Take it nice and easy. Here's the thing: When I make a statement, I like to be correct. I want the facts. This event just happened. In fact, a lot of the event didn’t even happen yet, as we were speaking. This event just happened.</p>
<p> Before I make a statement, I need the facts. So I don’t want to rush into a statement. So making the statement when I made it was excellent. In fact, the young woman, who I hear was a fantastic young woman, and it was on NBC -- her mother wrote me and said through, I guess, Twitter, social media, the nicest things. And I very much appreciated that. I hear she was a fine -- really, actually, an incredible young woman. But her mother, on Twitter, thanked me for what I said.</p>
<p> And honestly, if the press were not fake, and if it was honest, the press would have said what I said was very nice. But unlike you, and unlike -- excuse me, unlike you and unlike the media, before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.</p>
<p>Q Why do Nazis like you -- (inaudible) -- these statements?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: They don’t. They don’t.</p>
<p>Q They do. Look --</p>
<p> (Cross-talk.)</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: How about a couple of infrastructure questions.</p>
<p>Q Was it terrorism, that event? Was that terrorism?</p>
<p>Q The CEO of Walmart said you missed a critical opportunity --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Say it. What?</p>
<p>Q The CEO of Walmart said you missed a critical opportunity to help bring the country together. Did you?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Not at all. I think the country -- look, you take a look. I've created over a million jobs since I'm President. The country is booming. The stock market is setting records. We have the highest employment numbers we've ever had in the history of our country. We're doing record business. We have the highest levels of enthusiasm. So the head of Walmart, who I know -- who's a very nice guy -- was making a political statement. I mean --</p>
<p>Q (Inaudible.)</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I'd do it the same way. And you know why? Because I want to make sure, when I make a statement, that the statement is correct. And there was no way -- there was no way of making a correct statement that early. I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters. Unlike a lot of reporters --</p>
<p>Q Nazis were there.</p>
<p>Q David Duke was there.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts. And the facts, as they started coming out, were very well stated. In fact, everybody said, "His statement was beautiful. If he would have made it sooner, that would have been good." I couldn’t have made it sooner because I didn’t know all of the facts. Frankly, people still don’t know all of the facts.</p>
<p>It was very important -- excuse me, excuse me -- it was very important to me to get the facts out and correctly. Because if I would have made a fast statement -- and the first statement was made without knowing much, other than what we were seeing. The second statement was made after, with knowledge, with great knowledge. There are still things -- excuse me -- there are still things that people don’t know.</p>
<p> I want to make a statement with knowledge. I wanted to know the facts.</p>
<p>Q Two questions. Was this terrorism? And can you tell us how you're feeling about your chief strategist, Stephen Bannon?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country. And that is -- you can call it terrorism. You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want. I would just call it as "the fastest one to come up with a good verdict." That's what I'd call it. Because there is a question: Is it murder? Is it terrorism? And then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.</p>
<p>Q Can you tell us how you're feeling about your chief strategist, Mr. Bannon? Can you talk about that?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Q I would echo Maggie's question. Steve Bannon has come under --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I never spoke to Mr. Bannon about it.</p>
<p>Q Can you tell us broadly what your -- do you still have confidence in Steve?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Well, we'll see. Look, look -- I like Mr. Bannon. He's a friend of mine. But Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through 17 senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that. And I like him, he's a good man. He is not a racist, I can tell you that. He's a good person. He actually gets very unfair press in that regard. But we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon. But he's a good person, and I think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly.</p>
<p>Q Senator McCain has called on you to defend your National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, against these attacks.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I did it the last time.</p>
<p>Q And he called on it again, linking --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Senator McCain?</p>
<p>Q -- to the alt-right, and saying --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Senator McCain?</p>
<p>Q Yes</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: You mean the one who voted against Obamacare?</p>
<p>Q And he said --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Who is -- you mean Senator McCain who voted against us getting good healthcare?</p>
<p>Q Senator McCain said that the alt-right is behind these attacks, and he linked that same group to those who perpetrated the attack in Charlottesville.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don’t know. I can't tell you. I'm sure Senator McCain must know what he's talking about. But when you say the alt-right, define alt-right to me. You define it. Go ahead.</p>
<p>Q Well, I'm saying, as Senator --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: No, define it for me. Come on, let's go. Define it for me.</p>
<p>Q Senator McCain defined them as the same group --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging at -- excuse me, what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?</p>
<p> Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. As far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.</p>
<p>Q You're not putting these --</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Wait a minute. I'm not finished. I'm not finished, fake news. That was a horrible day --</p>
<p>Q Sir, you're not putting these protestors on the same level as neo-Nazis --</p>
<p>Q Is the alt-left as bad as white supremacy?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I will tell you something. I watched those very closely -- much more closely than you people watched it. And you have -- you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now. You had a group -- you had a group on the other side that came charging in, without a permit, and they were very, very violent.</p>
<p>Q Is the alt-left as bad as Nazis? Are they as bad as Nazis?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Q Do you think that what you call the alt-left is the same as neo-Nazis?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Those people -- all of those people --excuse me, I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.</p>
<p>Q Should that statue be taken down?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. If you take a look at some of the groups, and you see -- and you'd know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you're not -- but many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.</p>
<p> So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?</p>
<p> But they were there to protest -- excuse me, if you take a look, the night before they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.</p>
<p> Infrastructure question. Go ahead.</p>
<p>Q Should the statues of Robert E. Lee stay up?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I would say that's up to a local town, community, or the federal government, depending on where it is located.</p>
<p>Q How concerned are you about race relations in America? And do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I think they've gotten better or the same. Look, they've been frayed for a long time. And you can ask President Obama about that, because he'd make speeches about it. But I believe that the fact that I brought in -- it will be soon -- millions of jobs -- you see where companies are moving back into our country -- I think that's going to have a tremendous, positive impact on race relations.</p>
<p> We have companies coming back into our country. We have two car companies that just announced. We have Foxconn in Wisconsin just announced. We have many companies, I say, pouring back into the country. I think that's going to have a huge, positive impact on race relations. You know why? It's jobs. What people want now, they want jobs. They want great jobs with good pay, and when they have that, you watch how race relations will be.</p>
<p> And I’ll tell you, we’re spending a lot of money on the inner cities. We’re fixing the inner cities. We’re doing far more than anybody has done with respect to the inner cities. It’s a priority for me, and it’s very important.</p>
<p>Q Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs -- and it was vicious and it was horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch.</p>
<p>But there is another side. There was a group on this side. You can call them the left -- you just called them the left -- that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.</p>
<p>Q (Inaudible) both sides, sir. You said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides. Are the --</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides -- I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either.</p>
<p>And if you reported it accurately, you would say.</p>
<p>Q The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group.</p>
<p>Q (Inaudible.)</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did.</p>
<p>You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.</p>
<p>Q George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down --</p>
<p>Excuse me, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?</p>
<p>Q I do love Thomas Jefferson.</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?</p>
<p>So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.</p>
<p>Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.</p>
<p>Q Who are the good people?</p>
<p>Q Sir, I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly? I just don’t understand what you were saying.</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: No, no. There were people in that rally -- and I looked the night before -- if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people -- neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.</p>
<p>But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest -- because I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country -- a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.</p>
<p>Does anybody have a final --</p>
<p>Q I have an infrastructure question.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: You have an infrastructure --</p>
<p>Q What makes you think you can get an infrastructure bill? You didn’t get healthcare --</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know, I’ll tell you. We came very close with healthcare. Unfortunately, John McCain decided to vote against it at the last minute. You’ll have to ask John McCain why he did that. But we came very close to healthcare. We will end up getting healthcare. But we’ll get the infrastructure. And actually, infrastructure is something that I think we’ll have bipartisan support on. I actually think Democrats will go along with the infrastructure.</p>
<p>Q Mr. President, have you spoken to the family of the victim of the car attack?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: No, I’ll be reaching out. I’ll be reaching out.</p>
<p>Q When will you be reaching out?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: I thought that the statement put out -- the mother’s statement I thought was a beautiful statement. I will tell you, it was something that I really appreciated. I thought it was terrific. And, really, under the kind of stress that she’s under and the heartache that she’s under, I thought putting out that statement, to me, was really something. I won’t forget it.</p>
<p>Thank you, all, very much. Thank you. Thank you.</p>
<p>* * * *</p>
<p>Q Will you go to Charlottesville? Will you go to check out what happened?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: I own a house in Charlottesville. Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?</p>
<p>Q Where is it?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: Oh boy, it’s going to be --</p>
<p>Q Where is it?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: It's in Charlottesville. You'll see.</p>
<p>Q Is it a winery or something?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: It is the winery.</p>
<p>I mean, I know a lot about Charlottesville. Charlottesville is a great place that's been very badly hurt over the last couple of days.</p>
<p>Q (Inaudible.)</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It's in Charlottesville. </p>
<p>Q Do you believe your words are helping to heal this country right now?</p>
<p>Q What do you think needs to be done to overcome the racial divides in this country?</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think jobs can have a big impact. I think if we continue to create jobs -- over a million, substantially more than a million. And you see just the other day, the car companies coming in with Foxconn. I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I’m creating jobs, I think that’s going to have a tremendous impact -- positive impact on race relations.</p>
<p>Q Your remarks today, how do you think that will impact the racial, sort of conflict, today?</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: The people are going to be working, they’re going to be making a lot of money -- much more money than they ever thought possible. But that’s going to happen.</p>
<p>Q Your remarks today.</p>
<p> THE PRESIDENT: And the other thing -- very important -- I believe wages will start going up. They haven’t gone up for a long time. I believe wages now -- because the economy is doing so well with respect to employment and unemployment, I believe wages will start to go up. I think that will have a tremendously positive impact on race relations.</p>
<p><strong>Executive Order Streamlining Infrastructure Permitting</strong></p>
<ul><li>On August 15, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order entitled, “Establishing Discipline and Accountability in the Environmental Review and Permitting Process for Infrastructure Projects,” which is a crucial step in fulfilling his commitment to eliminate the Federal bureaucracy attached to environmental review and permitting for major infrastructure projects.</li>
<li>President Trump is a builder. With that builder’s mindset, he recognizes that the current sea of Federal red tape for environmental reviews and permitting unnecessarily hampers the delivery of major infrastructure projects and prevents the American people from enjoying the benefits of upgraded infrastructure.</li>
<li>The President has heard the calls from other builders—project sponsors, infrastructure industries, and State and local governments—to break down the countless Federal Government obstacles that impede infrastructure progress. With this action today, help is on the way to build faster the major infrastructure projects that America desperately needs.</li>
<li>The Executive Order directs agencies to take important actions that will fundamentally transform the way the Federal Government processes environmental review and permitting decisions for infrastructure projects—
<ul><li>One Federal Decision: No longer will sponsors of major infrastructure projects be forced to spend time and money navigating a complex web of permitting and environmental reviews with multiple Federal agencies. The Executive Order requires the Federal Government to speak with one voice through One Federal Decision.</li>
<li>2-Year Goal: The Executive Order takes aim at the decade it can currently take the Federal Government to process environmental documents for major infrastructure projects and instead establishes a 2-year goal. Not only will this save time, it will save money and provide projects sponsors much-needed predictability in scheduling and delivering projects.</li>
<li>Accountability: Private entities are routinely held accountable for achieving milestones in delivering projects, and with this Presidential action, the Federal Government will be held accountable, too. The Executive Order requires Federal agencies to track their achievement of milestones, report progress to the White House, and face penalties for poor performance.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Importantly, this Executive Order will ensure the Federal Government will conduct environmental reviews more efficiently while still protecting the environment. Environmental laws have important objectives, but the Federal Government’s current inefficiencies needlessly impede delivery of infrastructure projects throughout the country.</li>
<li>Accountability and reform of the Federal bureaucracy concerning environmental review and permitting of infrastructure projects is long overdue. The President’s action today will ensure more timely and efficient infrastructure investment that will strengthen the American economy, make our country more competitive, create jobs and increase wages for workers, and reduce the costs of goods and services for our families.</li>
</ul><p align="center"><u><strong>POTUS SCHEDULE</strong></u></p>
<ul><li>Infrastructure Discussion and Executive Order Signing</li>
</ul><p align="center"><strong><u>OTHER TOP POINTS</u></strong></p>
<p><strong>Presidential Memorandum Addressing Chinese Intellectual Property Practices</strong></p>
<p>Top Line:</p>
<ul><li>With this memorandum, President Trump is standing up for American companies and workers against China’s unfair trade practices and industrial policies, including forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft.
<ul><li>China’s industrial policies stack the deck against American companies by forcing the transfer of cutting-edge technology and intellectual property.</li>
<li>For example, U.S. companies can be required to enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies if they want to do business in China, resulting in Chinese companies forcibly acquiring U.S. intellectual property.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Americans are the world’s most prolific innovators, creating the greatest technologies, products, and companies. They should not be forced or coerced to turn over the fruits of their labor.
<ul><li>The current trajectory is unsustainable. Innovation in the U.S. economy is put at risk by China continually forcing companies to turn over their proprietary technologies and IP.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>The President is also standing strong against the theft of American IP, including defense-related technologies.
<ul><li>The costs of intellectual property theft alone to the U.S. economy are estimated to be as high as $600 billion a year.</li>
<li>Such thefts not only damage American companies, they also threaten our national security.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>President Trump is committed to protecting American technology and ensuring our national security.</li>
</ul><p>This Presidential Memorandum:</p>
<ul><li>Directs the United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to determine, consistent with section 302(b) of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2412(b)), whether to investigate any of China’s laws, policies, practices, or actions may be unreasonable or discriminatory and that may be harming American intellectual property, innovation, or technology.
<ul><li>Section 302(b) permits the USTR to investigate acts, policies, or practices of a foreign country to determine whether they are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict U.S. commerce</li>
<li>Should the USTR decide to launch such an investigation, he will have, at his discretion, broad powers to use all applicable measures, including, but not limited to, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which provides a basis for addressing technology transfer practices that may be harming the U.S. economy, exports, and American jobs.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul><p>Additional Background:</p>
<ul><li>If Americans continue to have their best technology and intellectual property stolen or forcibly transferred offshore, the United States will find it difficult to maintain its current technology leadership position and to remain one of the world’s most innovative economies.</li>
<li>The U.S. government, industry representatives, and other experts have been raising substantial concerns about Chinese government pressure to transfer valuable U.S. technology to China. Examples of reported pressure include:
<ul><li>China uses restrictions such as joint venture requirements, equity ownership limitations, opaque administrative processes, and other practices aimed at the transfer of U.S. technology to Chinese companies;</li>
<li>China imposes non-market-based terms on contracts signed by U.S. firms with Chinese entities; and</li>
<li>China funds and facilitates the acquisition of U.S. firms that possess advanced technologies.</li>
<li>China has gained unauthorized access to the computer networks of U.S. businesses for commercial purpose and, on a number of occasions, has stolen firms’ commercial information.
<ul><li>The types of sensitive information obtained included internal communications that would provide a competitor or an adversary in litigation insight into the strategy and vulnerabilities of the American entity.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul></li>
<li>The consequences of China’s reported actions may include: lost or reduced U.S. sales, exports, and jobs in key technology sectors; loss of intellectual property or proprietary technology to Chinese companies; loss of competitive position in the marketplace or in business negotiations; and network security costs, legal fees, and other costs.</li>
<li>President Trump is fulfilling yet another promise to the American people on trade. In June 2016, President Trump promised the American people that he would “use every lawful presidential power” to crack down on trade abuses in China, and this announcement is the first step in that process.</li>
<li>Given the importance of this issue and widespread concern about Chinese practices, USTR Lighthizer will immediately review these issues to take prompt and appropriate action in response to this memorandum.</li>
</ul></blockquote><p></p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / Reuters'The President Was Entirely Correct'2017-08-15T21:32:13-04:002017-08-15T21:32:13-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-537042President Trump’s remarks on the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville have sparked widespread outrage. But the White House is asking congressional Republicans to follow his lead.<p>BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—No one seems to know what moved the president to issue the tweet that shook Alabama.</p><p>Last Tuesday, President Trump took a break from his usual bluster—blasting the Fake News media; threatening North Korea with “fire and fury”—to make a different kind of statement, the likes of which he’d never made before. “Senator Luther Strange has done a great job representing the people of the Great State of Alabama,” Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/895091395379245056">tweeted</a> at 9:16 p.m. “He has my complete and total endorsement!”</p><p>It was the first time the president had waded into a contested Republican primary, and he had done so on behalf of the race’s most disliked candidate—an incumbent backed by the Washington establishment but unpopular in his home state, who viewed him as the beneficiary of a corrupt bargain with a governor driven from office by a sex scandal.</p><p>Republicans in Alabama were puzzled. Strange himself was surprised—he nearly drove off the road when Trump called him from the White House on Tuesday afternoon, he said. Republicans in Washington didn’t know it was coming, either; Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, had previously lobbied Trump to back Strange, but had not mentioned it to him for weeks, a source close to McConnell told me.</p><p>The usual slavishly pro-Trump conservative media were enraged. Mark Levin, the conservative radio host, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/13/politics/ip-forecast-kushner-scrutiny-and-trump-mcconnell-feud/index.html">called</a> Trump’s tweet “a stab in the back to every conservative in this country,” while a Huntsville talk-radio host <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/08/10/trumps_backing_of_strange_has_ala_conservatives_reeling_134715.html">called it</a> “ignorant.” The normally pro-Trump quarters of Fox News and <em>Breitbart</em> lit up with condemnation.</p><p>Strange has been a senator for just six months, having been appointed to the position when his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, became Trump’s attorney general. Before that, Strange was the attorney general of Alabama, overseeing the ethics investigation of the governor who, after appointing him, would resign to avoid impeachment. Before that, he was a Washington lobbyist. On Tuesday, Strange faces a multi-way GOP primary to keep his seat, with the top two candidates to go to a runoff if none gets a majority of the vote. Polls have him languishing in a distant second place.</p><p>Trump’s endorsement was seen as a potential game-changer for the struggling Strange, who immediately featured it in a barrage of TV ads. It was also a major boost to McConnell, who has invested heavily in Strange’s campaign. But the day after he backed Strange, Trump turned on McConnell. In a series of tweets Wednesday and Thursday, he blasted the Senate leader for failing to repeal Obamacare—and then leaving Washington on vacation. “Mitch, get back to work!” Trump tweeted. Later Thursday, he told reporters he might consider seeking McConnell’s ouster if the Senate didn’t start getting things done.</p><p>Trump’s attack on McConnell appeared to have been prompted by some gently patronizing comments the latter had made about Trump at a Rotary meeting in Kentucky: “Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before,” McConnell said. “And I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.” But two sources close to the White House told me that Trump didn’t find out McConnell had said that until after he’d made the Alabama endorsement—and it was this that fueled his rage.</p><p>“When Trump saw McConnell insulting him, he was apoplectic, because he had just done him this big favor” with the endorsement, a strategist with ties to the White House told me. Trump perceived the McConnell comments as a double betrayal considering he’d just expended political capital—and reaped blowback from his base—on McConnell’s behalf.</p><p>In Alabama, the feud is playing out as a test of conservative voters’ loyalties in the Trump era—one of the first referendums on Trump’s ability to command his own partisans, and by extension to shape the GOP that he leads. But it’s a test complicated by the mixed messages Trump himself has sent to his supporters. Will Republicans listen to his endorsement and vote for Strange? Or will they heed his attacks on McConnell, and act to punish McConnell’s candidate as he becomes the scapegoat for Trump’s flailing prospects?</p><p>Representative Mo Brooks, a conservative congressman who’s polling in third in the primary, pronounced himself “baffled” by Trump’s position. “All of this is very paradoxical, because on the one hand, President Trump vigorously complains about Mitch McConnell not getting the job done in the United States Senate,” Brooks told me. “But on the other hand, the president endorses Mitch McConnell’s boy in this Senate race.”</p><p>I asked Brooks if he thought the president was confused. “There seems to be great inconsistency in positions and hoped-for outcomes,” he said. “I think the president made a major mistake in endorsing Luther Strange.”</p><p class="dropcap">B<span class="smallcaps">ig Luther came loping into a meeting room</span> at a Birmingham-area public library on Thursday night, panting slightly and apologizing for having kept everybody waiting. A lanky six-foot-nine, Strange’s head seems too small for his massive body, and he had a slightly panicked look on his bland, pale face. He wasn’t actually late for his turn to speak to the executive committee of the Jefferson County Republicans, but having, unlike the other candidates, arrived after the meeting began, he didn’t know that.</p><p>Each candidate had been allotted five minutes to speak, and the others had rushed to pack their time with as much red meat as possible—reciting their long political resumes, articulating their many conservative policy stances, explaining at length their claim to be the best choice. Strange didn’t do any of that.</p><p>He pointed out that he was from the area—he had, he said, been hit by a car a block from this very spot as a child. He thanked the voters and thanked his opponents. And then he recounted his momentous phone call from Trump.</p><p>The president, he said, had thanked him for his loyalty and support and offered his help in return. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, whatever you think is appropriate—a tweet wouldn’t be bad!’ He said, ‘You know I have 118 million Twitter followers.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I’m very well aware of that.’”</p><p>There were chuckles from the crowd, a few dozen, mostly elderly, well-dressed white people on folding chairs. “I can’t say anything much more than what the president himself has said,” Strange said. “The president needs somebody who will work with him, who has his back. I’m going to be working as closely as I possibly can with the president to get his agenda passed as long as I’m in the U.S. Senate.” He had, he said, spoken to Trump again today, and the president had reiterated his support.</p><p>In conclusion, Strange said he guessed his time was probably about up. Not so, said the timekeeper—he had two more minutes remaining. But the senator didn’t have anything more to say. He left the stage and headed for the door.</p><p>In the hallway, Strange said he agreed with the president’s criticism of McConnell—“I don’t know why we’re taking a vacation,” he said. “We should be working to pass the president’s agenda.” Did he think, then, that McConnell should be replaced, I asked? No, he replied—McConnell was not the problem. “We don’t have 50 conservative Republican votes, and I don’t think Mitch McConnell or anybody else can make John McCain or the two ladies that voted the other way vote against their perceived interest.”</p><p>Despite being technically the incumbent in the race, and having had millions in television advertising broadcast on his behalf by a McConnell-backed political fund, Strange is viewed favorably by just 35 percent of Alabama Republicans, while 50 percent view him unfavorably, according to a <a href="http://winwithjmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Alabama-Senate-Republican-Executive-Summary-Release.pdf">recent poll</a>. Every Alabama political operative, observer, and voter I spoke to chalked this up to the circumstances of Strange’s appointment to the Senate.</p><p>The governor, Robert Bentley, was a dermatologist and Baptist deacon who was fairly well-liked until, halfway through his second term, he was publicly accused of carrying on an extramarital affair with an aide and using state resources to try and cover it up. Explicit audio recordings and text messages soon surfaced, and the state House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings. But Strange, the state attorney general, asked the lawmakers to put their investigation on hold so that his office could examine the matter.</p><p>A few months later, Bentley appointed Strange to the Senate. Strange denied there was any conflict of interest or quid pro quo. Two months after that, Bentley resigned, making a deal with state prosecutors that involved pleading guilty to two misdemeanors and avoiding jail time.</p><p>The other candidates have criticized Strange, calling him corrupt and unethical. Brooks told me Strange had “held over the head of our governor a criminal prosecution while seeking a personal gain from the governor, in violation of all the ethics rules that govern prosecutors.” A complaint against Strange has been filed with the Alabama Ethics Commission, but it is not scheduled to meet until after this week’s election.</p><p>But the election has not mostly focused on this issue; it has centered on who loves Trump the most. Brooks himself is currently unpopular with voters after a barrage of attack ads have accused him of being sympathetic to Nancy Pelosi and ISIS—and, most lethally, unsympathetic to Trump. During the 2016 primaries, when Brooks was campaigning for Ted Cruz, he repeatedly attacked Trump, calling him untrustworthy and “a serial adulterer.”</p><p>Private polling by the super PAC running the ads, the Senate Leadership Fund, found that accusation resonated strongly with Trump-loving Alabama Republicans. Moore has consistently polled in first place, with Strange in second and Brooks close behind him—a <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4lhKxf9pMitdkV5RlpvbGxwWFU/view">poll</a> last week by the Trafalgar Group found that Brooks had been gaining on Strange until the Trump endorsement seemed to stall his momentum. And so Brooks and Moore have rushed to proclaim their fealty to Trump.</p><p>“Folks, you’re looking at the guy who has supported Donald Trump—more so, with his agenda in the United States Congress, than any other candidate in this race,” Brooks told the GOP gathering. He agreed with Trump’s repeated call to eliminate the Senate’s 60-vote rule, which, he said, would make it easier to get the president’s agenda approved.</p><p>Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was twice removed from his post for defying federal court orders—once when he refused to remove a giant monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse building, and again (after voters returned him to the position) when he refused to implement the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Folksy and genial, the 70-year-old Moore has the lacquered look of an aging televangelist.</p><p>“I support making America great again. I believe we <em>can</em> make America great again,” Moore told the group. The race, he said, would send a signal nationally about the future direction of the Republican Party. “Are we going to go forward?” he asked. “Or are we going to stay stagnant, as we are? If we don’t go forward, we’re going to lose our country.”</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">While Moore is colorful</span> and Strange represents the establishment, Mo Brooks is probably the most interesting of the Senate contenders: a Tea Party conservative in the Ted Cruz mold, which seemed to be what Republican primary voters were looking for—until Trump came along and upended the paradigm.</p><p>The day after the candidate forum, Brooks was eating lunch with a dozen supporters at a seafood shack in Spanish Fort, on the Gulf Coast near Mobile. His campaign bus, “The Drain the Swamp Express,” was parked outside, in a rapidly accumulating puddle, as a violent summer storm lashed the coastal landscape.</p><p>Brooks picked at a basket of fried fish and French fries, dipping them methodically in ketchup with a fork, as he listened to his people’s lament. With dull brown eyes and a helmet of white hair, the 63-year-old Brooks has a stiff, dorky countenance and an abrupt style. In one of our interviews, after parrying my questions in a rapid-fire monotone, he observed flatly: “I’m sure you appreciate that I have very little in the way of diplomatic skills but a lot in the way of forthrightness and candor, which you probably enjoy.”</p><p>At one end of the table, a Brooks volunteer named Celia Waters, a retired speech pathologist in a long white dress, was expressing disgust with Strange. “A lot of people are very upset with Mitch McConnell, and it’s only going to get worse if they can’t get anything done,” she said. “Luther is his pet RINO! He leads him around on a leash!”</p><p>Brooks’s wife of 41 years, Martha, said the Trump endorsement didn’t make any sense to her. “I don’t know what was said to the president to get him to endorse Luther,” she said. “I don’t know if he knew the whole story about Luther.”</p><p>A member of the House Freedom Caucus—which, he likes to remind people, you have to be invited to join—Brooks is a rock-ribbed fiscal and social conservative. He is an anti-immigration crusader who boasts the highest rating in the House of Representatives from the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA. Elected to represent the Huntsville area in the 2010 Tea Party wave, Brooks is in his fourth term in the House.</p><p>Huntsville is on the far northern edge of Alabama. Here in the southern reaches of the state, Brooks is not well known, Waters told me, and many Republican voters only know about him what they’ve seen in those darned television ads. She had been making phone calls on Brooks’s behalf, and this was the problem she kept running into. “When I explain everything he stands for, his policies—that’s what they’re looking for,” she said. “But the biggest concern is that they think he didn’t back president Trump. All that stuff has been taken out of context.”</p><p>After Trump won the Republican primary, Brooks fell in line behind him, even sending a campaign contribution two days after the <em>Access Hollywood</em> tape seemed to deal a fatal blow to his presidential run. Strange, Brooks contends, “never lifted a finger.” Now, however, Brooks finds himself caught between the Republican establishment he’s made a career of opposing, and the whims of an unpredictable president who’s simultaneously attacking the establishment and taking its side in Alabama.</p><p>Brooks may claim support for Trump, but he makes it clear that his true loyalty is to principles, not personalities.That makes him an outlier in a party whose voters have largely joined the Cult of Trump. I asked him if he thought Trump was a conservative, and he answered with a tight smile: “I don’t know.” Why, then, was he so eager to align himself with Trump now, I asked?</p><p>Brooks sighed. “We all have disagreements,” he said. “What is important if you’re an elected official is the public-policy agenda. I don’t vote for or against something because of the person behind the position, I vote based on whether I believe that it’s good for our country.”</p><p>Brooks said he liked his chances of coming in second, and thus making the runoff, on Tuesday. “The biggest challenge I’ve got to overcome is the carpet-bombing of lies by Mitch McConnell and Luther Strange,” he told me. “The swamp critters are attacking me nonstop. They have decided I’m their biggest threat. And quite frankly, I agree with them.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJ. Scott Applewhite / APWhat Happens When Trump Endorses the Candidate of the Hated Establishment?2017-08-14T12:18:36-04:002017-08-15T10:41:17-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-536790A Senate primary in Alabama is playing out as a test of what Republicans care about more—loving the president or hating D.C.<p>HUNTINGTON, W.V.—Every day brings new drama, but the Trump Show’s themes remain the same. He’s come to tell his people that everyone else is wrong and they are right.</p><p>“The change you voted for is happening every single day,” he proclaims, underscoring each syllable with a raised hand, as the crowd bursts into cheers. Behind him, two signs hang in the rafters of this small arena:</p><p>PROMISES MADE, reads one.</p><p>PROMISES KEPT, reads the other.</p><p>Washington is torn between paralysis and alarm. The Congress is at odds with itself and its president. The special counsel’s investigation gets hotter and hotter, and has just been taken to a grand jury. There is talk of a constitutional crisis.</p><p>Yet the Trump Show goes on.</p><p>The presidency in crisis! How can this possibly be sustained? Where will it end? What is going to happen? But the answer is right in front of us: It’s happening right now, on an endless loop. <em>This</em> is what’s going to happen, day in and day out—nonstop chaos, plot twists and cliffhangers, a furious, embattled president who finds new ways to shock while never seeming to change.</p><p>The show goes on. The ratings are terrific! Trump keeps campaigning for the election that happened nine months ago, determined to keep that feeling alive.</p><p>He lashes out at the Congress, including his own party’s failed health-care vote: “The Republicans and Democrats let us down on that.”</p><p>He laments the Russia investigation: “A total fabrication.” It is, he says, “just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics. It just makes them feel better when they have nothing else to talk about. What the prosecutors should be looking at is Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.”</p><p>At that, the crowd erupts into a sustained roar, and the old, gleeful chants of “Lock her up!” can be heard.</p><p>The message to the faithful is clear enough: You are on the hook for this. An attack on me is an attack on you. To stop believing would be a betrayal.</p><p>“They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of you,” he says. It’s us versus them, and them is everybody else.</p><p>Their T-shirts proudly proclaim their hatreds: TRUMPED THAT BITCH, DEPLORABLE ’N CHIEF, DEATH TO LIBERALS. A leering Trump head on the cartoon Calvin figure, pissing on a snowflake.</p><p>Outside, the protesters are massed on a corner, buffered by the riot police in their helmets and bulletproof vests. A middle-aged woman waves a HILLBILLIES AGAINST TRUMP sign as the afternoon’s summer storm clears.</p><p>The spectacle, by now, is deeply familiar. But it retains the power to shock.</p><p>This is the Trump show, the neverending Trump show, and we’re all still glued to our seats.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">They love Trump here</span> in Appalachia, as you may have heard.</p><p>Dispatches from Trump Country fill the newspapers every day, sounding a tautological refrain: Trump supporters support Trump! They are predictable to the point of parody: The boarded-up Main Streets, the down-on-their-luck working-class white people, the unwavering loyalty.</p><p>Why is this news? If anything, Trump’s hard core seems to be <a href="https://www.axios.com/trumps-dangerously-low-support-among-his-base-2469593736.html">shrinking</a>, not expanding. Somehow it was not news when a devoted core of true believers refused to abandon the last president. But news is the unexpected—man bites dog—and the idea that <em>anyone</em> would stand by this president must be continually explained to the befuddled readers of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/us/california-far-north-identity-conservative.html"><em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em></a> and <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-trump-country-russia-just-isnt-big-news-heres-why/2017/07/21/8514f49e-6cc3-11e7-9c15-177740635e83_story.html?utm_term=.c5716bafb830">Washington Post</a></em>.</p><p>West Virginia is lush and green this time of year, the sinuous ribbon of federally-funded highway snaking through its rolling hills. Huntington sits on the western edge of the state, across the river from Ohio and down the road from Kentucky. There’s a glassed-in furniture showroom in the lobby of the Big Sandy Superstore Arena, a stolid brick-red rectangle in the middle of downtown. The arena doesn’t host a lot of events these days, if it ever did: Before the Trump rally, the last one was a WWE Live SummerSlam three weeks back.</p><p>It is clear to Dick Woodard, a retiree who drove here two hours from Parkersburg, that Trump’s detractors are simply afraid of the threat he poses to their power. He is just about as mad at the Republicans as the Democrats these days, he tells me. “They need to get out of his way, all of them,” he says. “I think we should vote them all out.”</p><p>In the background, Trump’s determinedly eclectic soundtrack is playing full-blast. At the moment that means the high-pitched vibrato of “Memory,” from <em>Cats</em>, wafting incongruously through the popcorn-scented air.</p><p>Woodard thinks Trump is doing a great job. He would like to see the wall get built and health care get fixed. “Obamacare about killed us,” he says, before his wife finally became eligible for Medicare.</p><p>Woodard’s neighbor in the stands, a Church of Christ minister in sunglasses and a Fitbit, leans over to interrupt the interview. “Nothing he’s saying is original!” he teases his friend. “It’s all Fox News!”</p><p>I tell Woodard I’m curious why people come to a campaign rally for an election that’s already over. “It’s like a ballgame,” he says. “It makes you feel good to hear the things you agree with and be with like-minded people.” He pauses. “It’s like a ballgame, but I guess here you only have one team.”</p><p>They have come here, more or less, to be lied to: Trump, in his speech, will say, “We are building a wall on the Southern border,” which is not actually happening, though some preexisting fencing <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2017/05/06/president-donald-trumps-border-wall-going-up-now/311317001/">is being repaired</a>. He will also claim that thousands more people were turned away outside, which isn’t true, and that coal jobs are “coming back strong,” though only about 1,000 coal jobs <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/06/06/pruitts-claim-that-almost-50000-jobs-have-been-gained-in-coal/?utm_term=.a56412cea8d5">have been created</a> during his tenure—a decrease from the previous administration’s pace.</p><p>One of the signs they’re waving tonight says “TRUMP DIGS COAL,” white letters on a black background. As Trump strides down the long catwalk to his lectern in the middle of the crowd, golden hair gleaming under the lights, he snatches one from a fan. He waves it and they cheer.</p><p>“The news pisses me off,” says Jerry Pullen, a 45-year-old local who’s sitting at the end of a row of wheelchairs and motorized scooters. He’s tired of the phony statistics, the negative tone. “I don’t think they should keep letting people into America when I’m unemployed,” he says. Raised a Democrat, Pullen dislikes both parties now; he only likes Trump.</p><p>I ask Pullen what Trump needs to accomplish to satisfy him, and he says, “Quit letting the Mexicans and Muslims in here. All the other foreign people, too. They’re terrorists. There’s too many people in this country—we’re overpopulated.” When he’s out on the street, he says, he can tell certain people are looking at him with contempt. “They hate me because I’m a white guy,” he says. “I can feel it.”</p><p>The sun is still out as they exit the arena around 8:30 p.m. Things are getting better in America every day, says JoAnn Lester, who worked at the coal mines until she was laid off a few years ago. “We can feel in our hearts that Trump does support us,” she says. “He won’t allow the immigrants in to take our jobs. He won’t allow MS-13 to kill us or Isis to destroy us. Everything America stands for, Trump stands for.”</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">rump has a big win</span> to brag about this evening—a major new addition to his team—and naturally it comes with a side of humiliation.</p><p>“We have a <em>very, very large</em> announcement, you understand?” he tells the crowd. “Large! Jim Justice—come on up, Jim. Look at this guy.”</p><p>The governor of West Virginia, who is indeed a large man, comes lumbering up to the lectern. A Democrat who used to be a Republican, he has decided to switch back to the GOP because of Trump—that’s the announcement.</p><p>The crowd seems indifferent at best as Justice begins to speak. A billionaire businessman who recently brought a tray of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jim-justice-budget-bill_us_58efc2a5e4b0bb9638e24cd7">actual cow dung</a> to show what he thought of his legislature’s budget plans, Justice says, “I can’t help you anymore as a Democratic governor.” Like Trump, he says, he doesn’t care about party—he just wants to get things done.</p><p>“What in the world is wrong with us as peoples?” Justice pleads. “Have we not heard enough about the Russians? I mean, to our God and heaven above! The stock market is at 22,000! We have hope!”</p><p>Trump’s most important quality, Justice says, is that he “has made us, as common, everyday Americans, feel good and be proud of who we are.”</p><p>Trump has been president for six months with not much to show for it. He was right, it turns out, when he said Washington was full of clowns, a bunch of politicians who had no idea what they were doing. He was just wrong, at least so far, about being able to fix it.</p><p>The most significant legislative achievement of the current Congress has been a bill that ties the president’s hands in international diplomacy. Trump responded with an angry counterpunch of a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/read-trumps-full-statement-russia-sanctions-bill-seriously-flawed/">statement</a>—“Congress could not even negotiate a health-care bill after seven years of talking”—but capitulated, signing the bill anyway. And then the House and Senate left for the summer. Sad!</p><p>But when you don’t have accomplishments, you still have identity to fall back on, and this more than anything is Trump’s refrain: We are a team, in this together, united by our shared blood and shared enemies.</p><p>“Our agenda rises above left and right,” he says. “It’s an agenda for all the people—especially the tens of millions of forgotten Americans. They’re not so forgotten anymore. And we will make sure you are never ignored again.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersThe Trump Show Never Ends2017-08-08T05:00:00-04:002017-08-08T11:22:39-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-536178<em>This</em> is what’s going to happen, day in and day out—an endless loop of shock and fury.<p>Six years ago, a humble party hack from Kenosha, Wisconsin, took on the thankless job of turning around the Republican Party. As he exits the White House—battered, bruised, and humiliated—Reince Priebus argues he accomplished just what he set out to do.</p><p>“We won,” Priebus told me in an interview. Calling from the golf course on Sunday afternoon, he sounded both defiant and relieved. “Winning is what we were supposed to do, and we won. That’s the job of the Republican Party. It’s in the best shape it’s been in since 1928.”</p><p>The former White House chief of staff and Republican National Committee chairman said he was proud of his stewardship of the GOP, which culminated in the election of a Republican president, Republican Congress, and Republican gains up and down the ballot.</p><p>But the White House is mired in chaos, and all that Republican power has yet to result in a single major policy achievement. Priebus’s critics view him as the man who sold his party out to Donald Trump. Was it really worth it, I asked?</p><p>“It’s absolutely worth it,” Priebus said, pointing to the appointment of a conservative Supreme Court justice, regulatory reform, and a healthy economy, though he acknowledged health care remained “an obstacle.” “The president has accomplished an incredible amount of things in the last six months,” he added. “The future can be great, and the past has been pretty good.” Even in exile, he was still committed to spinning the Trump line.</p><p>It has been a long, strange trip for Priebus, who came to Washington as GOP chairman in 2011 on a promise to reform a party in disarray. His story, in a way, is the story of the Republican Party itself: His initial wariness of Trump gave way to capitulation and then enabling. He swallowed his private qualms for the sake of the team, until his turn to be the victim of Trump’s pageant of dominance finally came—publicly disgraced, dismissed in a tweet.</p><p>“I see him as kind of a tragic figure,” said Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has known Priebus for many years. “What began as a matter of duty on his part—the decision to go all-in on Trump—ended with this scorchingly obscene humiliation.”</p><p>Sykes’s pity for his friend was limited, however. “It’s sad, but it’s the result of choices he made,” said Sykes, a Never Trumper who is now an MSNBC commentator. “It’s not like he wasn’t warned.”</p><p>Ironically, Priebus’s own career in national politics began with an act of disloyalty. In 2011, he won the RNC chair by running against his own boss, then-chairman Michael Steele. Despite big wins in the 2010 midterm elections, party activists had become dissatisfied with what they viewed as Steele’s mismanagement and penchant for gaffes. Steele knew he would have challengers when he sought another term as chairman—but he didn’t expect a challenge from Priebus, his general counsel, whom he considered a teammate.</p><p>“This is the bed Reince has been making for himself since he was my general counsel,” Steele told me. “He’s a guy who’s always positioning himself for the next thing. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?”</p><p>Priebus’s bid for RNC chairman was premised on the idea that he could do for the party nationally what he’d done as state party chairman in Wisconsin, where he had been on the vanguard of a resurgent conservative movement. As a lawyer and party activist, he’d watched his friend Scott Walker become governor and another friend, Paul Ryan, get anointed a rising Republican star.</p><p>They called themselves the “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-cheesehead-mafia-paul-ryan-and-the-rise-of-wisconsin-republicans/261727/?utm_source=feed">Cheesehead Mafia</a>.” In Washington, Ryan was the star policy wonk, one of the “young guns” remaking the party as a slick vehicle for extreme fiscal conservatism. In Madison, Walker pushed through a sudden, shocking assault on public-sector unions—then survived the left’s attempt to remove him in a hard-fought recall.</p><p>“We are not in competition with the conservative movement, we are part of the conservative movement,” Priebus said at the time. The national party, he promised, could broaden its ranks without compromising its principles—and win—just like Republicans had done in Wisconisn.</p><p>Republicans wanted more than anything to take down President Obama, and Priebus pitched himself as the man for the job. But in 2012, his first big test, the party fell short. Somehow, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/why-republicans-are-keeping-the-man-who-led-their-2012-disaster/272475/?utm_source=feed">nobody blamed Priebus</a>, even though one of the Romney campaign’s decisive shortcomings—an inability to compete with the Obama campaign in field organizing—had been the job of Priebus’s RNC. Priebus was a good fundraiser and party manager; most of all, he kept his constituents—the committee members across the country who elect the national chairman—happy.</p><p>Promising to figure out the party’s problems and fix them, Priebus was reelected chairman unanimously. He convened a group of insiders to conduct a sweeping study of what went wrong in the presidential election. They sifted data, conducted focus groups, and examined party rules, publishing a report that came to be known as the “autopsy.”</p><p>Young people and minorities, the report concluded, viewed the GOP as a bunch of cranky old white men. The party could change its image by deemphasizing social issues and coming out in favor of immigration reform. A set of tactical recommendations got less attention but may have been more consequential: Based on the report’s ideas, the party shortened the primary calendar, reduced the number of debates, and began a huge investment in data and ground operations.</p><p>These measures were intended to prevent the sort of drawn-out melee that was thought to have weakened Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and to put an infrastructure in place to aid the party’s candidates. But they may have had unintended consequences.</p><p>Like everyone else in the GOP, Priebus didn’t see Trump as a threat for the nomination. For years, he had cultivated the Manhattan mogul as a party donor, playing along with his flirtations with running for office on the assumption it wouldn’t ever happen. When Trump did get into the race—on a platform diametrically opposed to the autopsy’s recommendations for a kinder, gentler party—Priebus tried to leverage their relationship to rein him in. He called Trump after his campaign announcement and urged him to tone down the anti-immigrant rhetoric. And after Trump contended that John McCain was “not a war hero,” for example, the RNC issued a statement declaring, “there is no place in our party or our country” for such comments.</p><p>But Trump ignored him, and the conflict-averse Priebus fell into line. Trump exploited the divisions and weaknesses that the party had allowed to fester for so many years—the anger-primed base, the oppositional fervor. After the McCain incident, his continual outrages elicited nary a peep of rebuke from the party, nor was any attempt made to exclude him from the debates over which the RNC had near-total control. As Priebus’s friends in the GOP establishment wrung their hands, he insisted it wasn’t his place to intervene. His job as he saw it was to implement the will of the party’s voters, and to manage the chaos that resulted.</p><p>Privately, Priebus was frequently horrified by Trump’s behavior during the campaign. He deplored Trump’s attack on Khizr Khan, and when the <em>Access Hollywood</em> tape surfaced, he even urged Trump to drop out of the race—an insult Trump never let him forget. But publicly, he played the good soldier. When Trump won the Indiana primary, Priebus preemptively declared him the presumptive nominee. At the convention, he was instrumental in putting down a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/inside-republicans-last-doomed-fight-against-donald-trump/491600/?utm_source=feed">last-ditch rebellion</a> of anti-Trump partisans.</p><p>To the Never Trump crowd, Priebus was a craven patsy who sold out his principles.“He empowered Trump again and again,” the anti-Trump conservative writer David French <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/891097700434755584">tweeted</a> on Friday. “Reince was tireless in defending, excusing, empowering, and enabling Trump.”</p><p>All along, Priebus assumed Trump would lose. In the campaign’s final weeks, he considered rerouting campaign funds to the party’s down-ballot candidates; the RNC hosted a pre-election briefing to make the case to reporters that the expected loss wouldn’t be the party’s fault. The party, a source familiar with the episode told me, even put down a deposit on a venue in California for the RNC meeting to be held during the presidential inauguration in January—based on the assumption that it was the other party that would be celebrating in Washington. (Priebus told me the party had reserved hotels in D.C. and California in order to be prepared for either election outcome.)</p><p>When the impossible came to pass on Election Day, Priebus’s strategy seemed to have been vindicated. As the administration quickly became a rolling soap opera, the chief of staff was cast as the voice of the traditional GOP in the White House. But Trump never trusted him, and he never had the authority of a true chief of staff. Rather than being empowered to make decisions and to speak on the president’s behalf, he played the part of a nervous courtier, always hovering around the boss in an attempt to curry favor, always scrambling to clean up messes he was powerless to prevent. “He acts like a battered spouse,” the anti-Trump Republican consultant Rick Wilson told me.</p><p>Trump didn’t respect Priebus, but he saw him as his link to Ryan, the speaker of the House, and the congressional GOP. Priebus mostly found himself a harried go-between, frantically running interference between his out-of-control boss and exasperated lawmakers. “Reince always wanted to make sure he did not lose any friends,” Sykes told me. “Maybe that was the problem—he never wanted to burn bridges. He wanted to keep everybody happy.”</p><p>Everyone who works for Trump has to know that their turn in the barrel can come at any time, that the slavish loyalty he demands will be repaid only in abuse. Still, Priebus’s defenestration was particularly savage: a detested interloper brought in over his protestations, his best ally pushed out, Trump deafeningly silent as the new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, publicly derided him as “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic.” After his dismissal was announced, he suddenly <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/kenvogel/status/891042267905105920/photo/1">found himself alone</a> in a black Suburban as the rest of the motorcade left for the White House without him.</p><p>With Priebus out, the only traditional conservative remaining in the administration’s upper ranks is the vice president, Mike Pence, leading many on the right to fear that Trump will now openly turn on the GOP and begin pursuing an agenda antithetical to his party’s traditional principles.</p><p>Like Priebus, the Republican Party made a Faustian bargain when it capitulated to Trump’s takeover—it would sell its soul in order to win. But as chaos continues to swirl, Priebus is surely not the only Republican asking himself: What was that victory good for?</p><p>“We have a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House,” Priebus told me. “I have no regrets at all.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersThe Final Humiliation of Reince Priebus2017-07-30T19:40:08-04:002017-07-31T00:01:17-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-535368Like his party, the former White House chief of staff swallowed his principles in the name of power. He was repaid in savage indignity.<p>The House is mad at the Senate. The Senate is mad at the House. Various factions in the House and Senate are mad at each other or mad at their leaders.</p><p>Republican lawmakers have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/checks-balances/533511/?utm_source=feed">yet to turn</a> on President Trump in any meaningful way. But they’re starting to turn on each other.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p>On Monday, the Republicans’ tortured health-care effort hit a seemingly permanent snag. But that was only the latest blow; after half a year of consolidated GOP control, not a single major piece of legislation has been enacted. With other priorities similarly stalled, legislators’ frustration is mounting.</p><p>“We’re in charge, right? We have the House, the Senate, and the White House,” one GOP member of Congress told me. “Everyone’s still committed to making progress on big issues, but the more time goes by, the more difficult that becomes. And then the blame game starts.”</p><p>The House blames the Senate: At a press conference last week, Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/summer-vacation-is-one-more-thing-for-house-republicans-to-fight-about/2017/07/12/68e36278-6742-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html?utm_term=.1d422627496c">waved</a> a chart of 226 House-passed bills that the Senate hasn’t taken up. “We will continue to do our work here, and we hope the Senate continues to do their work as we move forward,” McCarthy said pointedly.</p><p>Some new members blame their elders. A freshman congressman from Michigan, Paul Mitchell, got a dozen of his fellow newbies to co-sign an op-ed that urges the Senate to get moving, implicitly calling out their senior colleagues for forgetting what they were sent to Washington to do. “Failure to do so is a failure to follow the will of our voters,” the freshmen wrote in their <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/07/18/12-freshman-house-members-its-time-for-senate-to-act-on-health-care.html">article</a> published Tuesday.</p><p>For its part, the Senate blames the House. A Russia sanctions bill passed the upper chamber with 98 votes a month ago, but it has yet to come to the floor in the House. That prompted Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to <a href="http://wmot.org/post/tenn-sen-corker-house-stop-dilly-dallying-russia-sanctions#stream/0">accuse</a> the House of “dilly dallying” and “a ridiculous waste of time.”</p><p>House leaders <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/10/russia-sanctions-republicans-royce-240378">say</a> procedural issues and Democrats have tied up the legislation, which the White House opposes. Some members, however, suspect that House leadership is purposely slow-walking the bill to avoid embarrassing the president. A spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan denied that was the case, telling me the White House’s position on the issue was “not a factor” in the bill’s fate.</p><p>Though little heralded, the sanctions bill could mark a moment of truth for White House-congressional relations. If sent to President Trump’s desk, the bill would amount to a rebuke of the president’s Russia policy, one he would surely be loath to sign. But given the Russia scandal swirling around Trump, a veto would be explosive. And if the GOP Congress overrode such a veto, the president’s clout would be severely diminished.</p><p>Meanwhile, many senators are annoyed with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the rushed, secretive process that produced the health-care bill, and for threatening to cancel their August vacation for a potentially fruitless legislative session. And everyone is <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/12/freedom-caucus-cancel-recess-240458" style="font-weight: 700;">annoyed</a><span style="font-weight: 700;"> with the House Freedom Caucus, which has also demanded that lawmakers spend next month in D.C.</span></p><p>But everyone is always mad at the Freedom Caucus. Divisions between Republican factions are nothing new; nor is friction between the House and Senate. In an oft-repeated <a href="http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_senate_is_the_enemy">fable</a>, a new Republican member of Congress, eager to go after the “enemy” Democrats, is corrected by an old bull: “The Democrats are the opposition,” he says. “The Senate is the enemy.”</p><p>Still, some wonder whether the current sniping isn’t better directed to Pennsylvania Avenue, where the scandal-mired president creates new headaches with every passing day. “We’re a big-tent party, so of course there are divisions,” the member of Congress told me. “But the only thing that could unite the clans is consistent and engaged leadership from the president. And it’s fair to say we’ve gotten mixed signals.”</p><p>A House Republican staffer described the fractious mood on Capitol Hill as “Republican-on-Republican violence.” As for why lawmakers don’t train their ire on the real root of their problems, the staffer shrugged: “Maybe it’s just easier to attack people without 13 million Twitter followers.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersRepublicans Aren't Turning on Trump—They're Turning on Each Other2017-07-18T06:00:00-04:002017-07-18T13:50:28-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-533952With progress stalled on the GOP’s policy priorities, frustration is rising on Capitol Hill. But the White House isn’t taking the bulk of the blame.<p>Many years ago, when his eldest son was still a boy, Donald Trump was interviewed by Barbara Walters, along with his family. Which child, she asked the real-estate mogul, did he consider the troublemaker in the family?</p><p>Trump didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Don,” he shot back, according to the story Don himself—Donald Trump Jr., now a 39-year-old businessman—loves to tell. Don Jr. told me the story with a grin when I interviewed him for a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-apprentice/480765/?utm_source=feed">profile</a> last year. “I was the wild one of the three,” he said of his siblings. “I always made good grades and did well, but I had a lot of fun.”</p><p>Brash, strong-willed, risk-taking: These qualities made Don Jr. the most visible of the Trump children during the campaign. But this week’s revelations—the June 2016 email exchange, published Tuesday, in which Don, presented with potential campaign assistance from a supportive Russian government, replied, “I love it”—cast those same qualities in a different light. Once again, Don Jr. is his father’s troublemaker, but this time the trouble is much more than fun and games.</p><p>On Wednesday, I texted Don and asked how he was doing. “Fantastic,” he wrote back—followed by the “laughing crying” emoji. He declined to comment further.</p><p>His father’s foray into politics brought Don a new kind of fame that he clearly relished. While Ivanka and Eric and Jared, the other members of the Trump brain trust, mostly exerted influence behind the scenes, Don stormed into the spotlight. “He seems to have a very natural political instinct,” Donald Trump, the father, told me last year. Don’s knack for politics pleased his father, who described his eldest son as the best “salesman” of his children. (Eric’s strength, he said, was construction, while Ivanka’s was her imagination.) “People like him a lot. People have great trust in him,” he said.</p><p>Don’s feisty Twitter presence and aggressive television interviews <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/he-will-always-have-reddit/533277/?utm_source=feed">made him a hero</a> to the alt-right and the Trump base. An electrifying speech to last summer’s Republican convention stoked rumblings that he might follow his dad into elected office, perhaps by running for mayor of New York City or governor of New York state. Don clearly relished the idea: “The politics bug bit me,” he <a href="http://pagesix.com/2017/04/05/donald-trump-jr-talks-about-running-for-governor-of-new-york/">reportedly told</a> a gun club in April. Going back to business for the rest of his life after the exhilaration of 2016 would be “boring.”</p><p>Under different circumstances, in a more successful Trump administration, this could have been Don Jr.’s moment—the emergence of a potential political heir, perhaps even a second President Trump in the making. Instead, Don is the radioactive center of the controversy that’s consuming his father’s presidency, and his no-holds-barred zealotry looks more like downright recklessness—if not something more sinister.</p><p>The Russia emails, as Don <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/12/politics/donald-trump-jr-hannity/index.html">described</a> them to Sean Hannity on Tuesday, were the product of a son who just wanted to do whatever it took to help his father. He had thrown himself into the campaign from the start, finding the political arena a good showcase for his intense and combative personality. Ivanka got the most buzz, but her few campaign appearances were carefully choreographed; Don was the one who was out there on television and Twitter and on the stump, loudly defending his father—and bashing his opponents—at every turn.</p><p>It was Don, too, who best embodied his father’s particular brand of conservatism, unlike Ivanka, a supposed moderate who was always trying to sand off her dad’s rough edges. Don was all about the rough edges. He <em>was</em> the rough edges. He didn’t much care about social issues, but he loved guns, and he argued forcefully for the proposed Muslim ban and border wall. In one campaign controversy, he compared Syrian refugees to Skittles; in another, he was interviewed by a white supremacist radio host—unwittingly, he said. In March, Don went after the mayor of London, who is Muslim, as a terrorist attack was unfolding in that city. In his amplification of alt-right memes and pugilistic responses to controversy, Don could seem like a more instinctive proponent of Trumpism than even President Trump himself.</p><p>But Don wasn’t always his father’s Mini-Me. An angry and petulant youth, he actually didn’t fully buy into Trumphood until after college. Don had been a preteen when his parents’ separation and divorce began to consume the New York tabloids. After his mother, Ivana, got full custody, he left for boarding school and didn’t speak to his dad for a whole year. In college, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Don was known mostly for drinking and picking fights. He didn’t care about being one of the cool kids, a contemporary <a href="http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10610/">told</a> <em>New York</em> magazine, but he had the hottest girlfriend.</p><p>After graduation, Don moved to Colorado, where he worked as a bartender, fly-fished, and ski-bummed for more than a year. He wanted to make sure he didn’t wake up in the family business 10 years down the road full of regret about the road not taken. But after a while, he hankered for a faster-paced world. He returned to New York, quit drinking, and started to act like a Trump. By the time his father ran for president, he was brokering hotel deals and co-hosting <em>The Apprentice</em>.</p><p>The campaign, like the Trump Organization, was a family affair. Don was in the inner circle. It was Don who broke the news to Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, that he was being fired. Don was the most comfortable of the children on the hustings, introducing his father at rallies and stumping for him solo. (I met him when Don and Eric hosted a Super Bowl party at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Manchester, New Hampshire, just before that state’s primary.) Whatever ambivalence he might once have had about his birthright was gone—Don wanted to win.</p><p>Last month, when the former FBI director James Comey testified before the Senate, President Trump stayed quiet, but his namesake wasn’t about to let the family’s newest enemy off the hook. Don <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-goes-tweetstorm-during-comey-hearing-fbi-mueller-623375">rebutted</a> Comey in real time on Twitter, jeering, jousting, and picking apart Comey’s testimony. He questioned Comey’s “character,” accused him of leaking, and declared the whole investigation “10 months of nonsense whose only apparent goal was to take down <a data-query-source="hashtag_click" data-scribe="element:hashtag" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/POTUS?src=hash" rel="tag">#POTUS</a> &amp; stop him from doing what he was elected to do.”</p><p>Don was in his element—the taunter, the brawler, the freelance troll. In politics, the Trump family troublemaker had found his perfect niche. But now he may have earned a very different role: the fall guy. The <em>New York</em> <em>Post</em> editorial board rendered the most brutal verdict on the would-be political savant in a headline in Wednesday’s paper. “Donald Trump Jr.,” it <a href="http://nypost.com/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-is-an-idiot/">proclaimed</a>, “is an idiot.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersThe Troublemaker2017-07-13T06:00:00-04:002017-07-13T11:53:49-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-533496The same qualities that made Donald Trump Jr. his father’s political heir may have put him at the center of the latest scandal.<p>In the wake of last week’s special congressional election in Georgia, on which Democrats spent more than $30 million only to come up short, some on the left have taken solace in the idea that the result was nonetheless a good portent—a sign that Democratic candidates are poised to win the House next year.</p><p>The Georgia race, <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thoughts-on-the-disappointing-result-out-of-georgia-6">they point out</a>, took place in a “very Republican district”—one that went for its Republican representative, Tom Price, by a 23-point margin last year. (Price triggered the special election when he took the job of health and human services secretary in the Trump administration.) Republican Karen Handel, by contrast, won by just 4 percentage points, 52 percent, compared to 48 percent for the Democrat, Jon Ossoff.</p><p>By that calculation, Ossoff knocked 19 points off the normal Republican margin, a staggering swing. If Democrats could knock 19 points off every Republican representative’s winning margin in 2018, they would win a huge majority of seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans, by this logic, shouldn’t be celebrating Handel’s win; they should be quaking in their boots.</p><p>It is, of course, not that simple. While Ossoff did come impressively close, Democrats are going to have to improve on his showing nationally if they hope to take the House next year.</p><p>For one thing, Georgia’s Sixth District isn’t nearly as Republican as Price’s margin of victory suggests. He was a popular incumbent who had represented the district for more than a decade; his Democratic opponent in 2016 was someone named Rodney Stooksbury, who got there by being the only person to file papers for the Democratic nomination. Stooksbury spent $0 on the race and ran no perceptible campaign. A local TV station that tried to track him down found that not even his neighbors had heard of him, and <a href="http://www.cbs46.com/story/33632482/who-is-the-ghost-candidate-for-us-6th-district">concluded</a>, “Voters question if Stooksbury even exists.”</p><p>We can assume, then, that the 38 percent of the vote won by Stooksbury reflects the proportion of the district’s voters who would vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to its name.</p><p>Meanwhile, at the top of the ticket, Donald Trump also won the district, but by a much narrower margin: He took about 48 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 47 percent. That means Ossoff performed only a point better than Clinton did, while Handel overperformed Trump by 4 points.</p><p>Could Democrats win the midterms by getting about the same proportion of the vote as Clinton did last year? She did, after all, win the popular vote. But because of uneven population distribution and the way the House districts are drawn, this would not be enough: Trump won 230 out of 435 congressional districts, more than the 218 required for a majority. (Because so many Republican candidates, like Price, did better than Trump, Republicans actually won 241 seats.)</p><p>By this metric, it’s clear that Democrats must do more than simply match Clinton’s vote share to win the House.</p><p>Clinton did unusually well in Georgia’s Sixth, which is home to a disproportionate number of the sort of voters Trump struggled with: affluent, college-educated white professionals. These kinds of districts, where otherwise Republican-leaning voters were turned off by Trump, are precisely the ones Democrats will be targeting in 2018. But in many of them, they will be up against popular, conventional Republican incumbents—candidates like Tom Price—making it all the more of an uphill battle.</p><p>There are more nuanced ways of looking at a given district’s partisan tilt, such as the Cook Political Report’s <a href="http://cookpolitical.com/house/pvi">Partisan Voter Index</a>, which gives the Sixth District a rating of “R+8.” By that measure, Ossoff overperformed more significantly, though he still didn’t exceed expectations as much as the Democratic candidates in the other three, less-hyped special elections held this year, as <a href="http://cookpolitical.com/story/10391">David Wasserman explains</a>. The PVI calculation, which takes more than one presidential election into account, may be more accurate in assessing a given district’s baseline—or it may fail to account for the degree to which Trump will be a factor next year.</p><p>All of this math is a bit apples-to-oranges. Turnout in a presidential election is different from turnout in a midterm election, which is different from special-election turnout. It’s always a mistake to read too much into special elections; they are thermometers of the current political climate, not predictors of what’s to come.</p><p>But there’s one unavoidable fact: Democrats cannot win Congress in 2018 unless a substantial proportion of Trump’s 2016 voters either switch their votes or decide to stay home. In Georgia, that didn’t happen.</p><hr><h3>Related Videos</h3><h3><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/531216/" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe></h3>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedChris Aluka Berry / ReutersDemocrats Will Have to Do Better Than Ossoff2017-06-26T05:00:00-04:002017-06-26T15:31:43-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-531579The Georgia congressional race didn’t show a party on pace to take back the House next year.<p>ATLANTA—Around midnight, hours after their candidate conceded he had lost the Most Important Special Election in History, the last remaining supporters of Jon Ossoff took over the stage where he had recently stood. One of them waved a bottle of vodka in the air. Together, they took up the time-honored leftist chant: “This is what democracy looks like!”</p><p>Sometimes, this is indeed what democracy looks like: you get outvoted.</p><p>Democrats were counting on Ossoff, the boy wonder of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, to deliver the proof that, with Donald Trump in the White House, there was no limit to their political potential. But after a frenzied two-month runoff campaign between Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, the Democrat wound up with about the same proportion of the vote—48 percent—as Hillary Clinton got here in November. If this race was a referendum on Trump, the president won it.</p><p>It was a gut punch to Democrats’ confidence, a reality check to the idea that vast swaths of the country were ready to deliver a backlash. And it was the capstone to a losing season in which Democrats failed to capture any of the four Republican-held seats vacated by Trump’s cabinet appointees. Earlier in the same night, a little-watched South Carolina congressional race was also called for the Republican candidate.</p><p>But it was Georgia, in this well-off, well-educated suburban district, where Democrats had focused their attention, in a much-hyped battle that attracted the hopes and donations of activists across the country. Though both Ossoff and Handel tried to avoid it, they were cast as proxies in the national partisan fight, with enough hype and money—more than $50 million, or nearly $100 for every potential voter—poured in to make it by far the most expensive House race in history.</p><p>It was, as a somber Ossoff had told the crowd when the ballroom was still full, “something much bigger than any of us.”</p><p>Her hopes dashed, a dejected Hazel Hunt made her way through the crowd carrying a canvas on which she’d painted Ossoff’s portrait over an original poem, a limerick that began “There once was a country in pain.” Hunt’s green eyes were moist. “It’s very sad,” the middle-aged drama teacher told me. “It tells me that despite all the wonderful people I met in this campaign, there are still a lot of people who support the meanness and ignorance and tearing each other apart” that she saw Trump as representing.</p><p>Still, Hunt vowed to fight on, as did most of the others gathered there. They pointed out how much closer the race had been than that of the previous Republican congressman, Tom Price,who beat a token opponent by more than 20 points in November, then left Congress to serve as Health and Human Services secretary. The mood was more defiant than dejected.</p><p>“With all our hard work, I’m disappointed we didn’t make a bigger dent, but we’re not going back,” said Jennifer Orlow, who stood near the back of the room with three other women in matching blue Ossoff shirts. Orlow, a 45-year-old technology consultant, grew up here and cast every vote of her life in the Sixth District, which has been in Republican hands since 1979. “It has been a good nine months of disappointment for us, but we have to keep fighting,” she said.</p><p>They hoped to send one message to Washington; instead, they may have sent the opposite one—that the mass of American voters are in no hurry to deliver a rebuke to the chaos in Washington, and that Republican representatives still have wide leeway to pursue their policy objectives on issues like health care without losing or disheartening their base.</p><p>That is a tough pill to swallow for Democrats who have convinced themselves opposing Trump will bring them back from the brink of powerlessness. So far, they have cut into Republicans’ margins, but they have not yet figured out how to win, and moral victories get no votes in Congress. There was a latent fatalism in Ossoff’s parting words: “As darkness has crept across this planet,” he assured his supporters, they “have provided a beacon of hope for people in Georgia and for people around the world.”</p><p>Short of victory, hope would have to suffice.</p><p class="dropcap">D<span class="smallcaps">riving around the Sixth Congressional District</span>, you feel like you could be anywhere in America, and that was kind of the point.</p><p>For all the post-election talk of the misunderstood, left-behind rural voter, or the urban liberal bubble, the most contested voters of 2016 were in the territory in between the coalfield and the ivory tower. This is the America of strip malls and big-box stores, sushi buffets and light-rail park-and-rides, a landscape dotted with charter schools and pet hospitals and retirement villages along endless straight, flat, six-lane roads.</p><p>It was voters like these on whom Clinton’s campaign spent most of its advertising budget, only to have many of them conclude that Trump, for all his indecorousness, represented less of a threat to their way of life. According to exit polls, about half of the American electorate came from suburban areas in 2016, and Trump, despite losing the popular vote overall, won them by a slightly larger margin (4 points) than Romney had in 2012 (2 points).</p><p>Ossoff’s army of passionate volunteers—more than 12,000, according to the campaign—were convinced their neighbors had had second thoughts over the past eight months. On the eve of the election, a contingent of those volunteers occupied most of a strip-mall taqueria in Roswell to fuel up for a last night of canvassing.</p><p>When she woke up on November 9 and saw Trump had won, Jessica Zeigler recalled, she felt sick to her stomach. Zeigler, a 32-year-old mother of three who works for a medical-device company, couldn’t bring herself to tell her 7-year-old son who had won when he asked. After some weeks of feeling lost, she discovered a secret liberal moms’ group on Facebook—her first foray into activism, and an emboldening hint that she was not alone.</p><p>“I just decided, this cannot be where my kids grow up, this cannot be what is happening around them,” she told me over a plate of shrimp tacos. “Sometimes it takes feeling personally attacked to get people to be active.”</p><p>The mothers organized into a constellation of new organizations—dozens of chapters of the national Indivisible movement; a new local group called Pave It Blue—and drew hundreds of the similarly galvanized to their meetings. Many spoke about their activism in therapeutic terms: something they could do to process and exorcise their feelings of anger, powerlessness, and fear. They made new friends and learned local politics.</p><p>Most of all, they flocked to the underdog campaign of Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional staffer and documentary filmmaker whose campaign was initially blindsided by the groundswell. By the end, volunteers like Zeigler were sometimes giving the campaign direction, rather than the other way around—she developed a young-voter outreach plan that Ossoff’s staff adopted and funded. (Such outreach frequently involved knocking on the doors of these young adults’ Republican parents, who called the police on more than one occasion.)</p><p>Zeigler told me the volunteers hoped to build a model they could export to similar districts across the country. “We’re going to grab ’em by the midterms,” she said. “This is the most important work I’ve ever done.” Just then, a chant of “Flip the Sixth!” went up as three blue-shirted women headed out to their cars. “That’s Patricia and Liz and Jenny—they knocked on 450 doors today,” Zeigler told the other volunteers at the table.</p><p>By the end, the scale of the Ossoff campaign was staggering, with dozens of staffers, a sophisticated voter-turnout operation, and six field offices—the sort of footprint normally reserved for presidential campaigns. Most of the Ossoff volunteers I met were local residents who had grown up somewhere else, longtime Democrats who had long felt outnumbered.</p><p>In the end, they were no match for their neighbors’ deeply rooted political allegiances, and they may have become a self-reinforcing feedback loop.</p><p>A few miles down the road, at a different strip-mall restaurant, Handel was holding her own election-eve rally, where a woman in her 60s named Debbie Moscato told me how tired she was of all the canvassers marching around her neighborhood, often knocking and asking for people’s voting-age offspring. “They are harassing people,” she said. “I have heard so many stories of people our age with grown children getting harassed.”</p><p>The Republican voters’ normally quiet neighborhoods were covered in campaign signs and mailers, their phones ringing off the hook. It was unnerving. “It’s a different environment since November,” the area’s Republican state senator, Kay Kirkpatrick, told me. “The Democrats have been much more energized.” A physician, Kirkpatrick easily won a runoff last month against an upstart activist Democrat; she predicted Handel would do the same.</p><p>Sandy Capparell, 65, wore a neckful of sparkling gold chains and a red dress with a button reading “I’m an Adorable Deplorable.” She fretted about her 25-year-old son who had, after 16 years of private school and college, moved to California and been brainwashed by the liberals. Capparell, a retired hospital administrator, wished Trump would do more to bring people together—“I don’t know that he even is considering that”—but nonetheless said she was “not unhappy” with his performance so far.</p><p>I spotted only two red Trump hats in the room. One of them belonged to Joe Webb, a 70-year-old retired IBM manager with a white-blond beard and ponytail. “I worked my way up by myself, first generation off the tobacco farm,” he said. Now his children both have college degrees and work in science-related fields. Drawn to Trump for his stance on immigration, Webb’s only complaint with Handel was that she never seemed to mention the president.</p><p class="dropcap">F<span class="smallcaps">or both of the candidates</span>, Trump was He Who Must Not Be Named as the race wound down. “This race—it’s not about what’s going on around the rest of the country,” Handel told her supporters in the restaurant. “It’s about you and about the people of the Sixth District.” Earlier that day, the president had repeatedly tweeted in support of her.</p><p>Ossoff, too, seemed to spend most of his time deflecting questions about Trump, pivoting ceaselessly back to well-worn talking points about “fresh leadership” and “quality of life” and “bipartisanship delivering solutions.” “There are a lot of folks trying to look for national implications,” he told me, sitting in a back room of his campaign office in Chamblee, hands folded in his lap. “But that’s not what voters in the Sixth District are focused on.”</p><p>Despite their agreement on this point, the two candidates had found themselves bit players in a high-stakes contest whose stakes, to the audience outside the Sixth District, were almost entirely symbolic. Win or lose, either of them would be just one vote in a deadlocked Congress. But what would it mean for everyone else?</p><p>A documentary crew that was making a film about Ossoff had set up cameras in the room where I was interviewing him, trying to find something more than the same answers to the same questions, which he answered with annoyingly unflappable discipline. To get to the campaign office, I had driven past a Baptist church offering services in English, Spanish, and Korean, as well as gated developments of newly built brick McMansions.</p><p>As our interview concluded and I started to leave, Ossoff called me back into the room. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Everyone talks about how Ossoff won’t mention Trump, right? But when I give a speech about respect and civility and kindness and decency, am I not talking about Trump? I mean, I think everyone in the room understands the contrast, with perhaps a little subtlety, while building a coalition that doesn’t want hair-on-fire partisanship.”</p><p>Just as Handel aspired to be as generic a Republican as possible, Ossoff hoped to be, as much as possible, a blank slate, a nice young man in whom disgruntled voters of all stripes could see the alternative they wanted. His campaign slogan proclaimed him “Humble. Kind. Ready to Fight”—a positionless vessel of 2017’s cross-cutting political angst. It was a decision many would second-guess after the results were in. For this district, at least, Ossoff believed it was the only way he could possibly win.</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/523176/" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe></p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedChristopher Aluka Berry / ReutersWhy Ossoff Lost2017-06-21T07:26:47-04:002017-06-22T12:05:23-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-531072Despite the opposition Trump has galvanized, the Democrats still haven’t figured out how to win in the places where they’re trying to stage a comeback.<p>Ever since Donald Trump became president, wary Republican elites have believed he was an anomaly—a unique candidate who owed his success to celebrity appeal and weak opposition, despite some noxious views and behavior. Take away Trump the person, they believed, and there would be no Trump phenomenon.</p><p>That viewpoint got a rude wake-up call this week, in a Virginia Republican primary that wasn’t supposed to be a contest at all. And while the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate still won, the surprise result showed there’s still a substantial appetite in the party’s base for the populist impulses Trump represents.</p><p>Virginia elects governors in the odd-numbered years after presidential elections, and this year, it was Democrats whose primary looked like a pitched battle. Two well-credentialed progressives—one the sitting lieutenant governor, the other a former congressman and Obama administration official—were locked in a battle for the party’s soul. But despite polling showing a tight race, the Democratic establishment candidate, Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, pulled out an easy win, defeating Tom Perriello by a 12-point margin.</p><p>On the Republican side, meanwhile, Ed Gillespie expected to coast to an easy victory over his main challenger, Corey Stewart, a Trump acolyte who highlighted his hard line on immigration and support for Confederate monuments. It doesn’t get much more “establishment” than Gillespie, a former D.C. lobbyist and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Polls had shown Gillespie up by 20 points over Stewart, a local county board chairman. Gillespie had all the major endorsements and many times as much money as Stewart.</p><p>But off-year elections, where turnout varies wildly and partisans are often late to decide, are devilishly difficult to poll. Virginia primaries have defied the pollsters before: In 2014, grassroots conservatives delivered a shocking defeat to Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, just weeks after Cantor’s pollster had told him he was winning by 34 points.</p><p>In this case, Gillespie and Stewart’s vote totals hovered within a point of each other for hours after the polls closed. Gillespie was finally declared the winner by just over 1 percentage point, drawing 43.7 percent of the vote to Stewart’s 42.5 percent.</p><p>I spent the weekend before Tuesday’s vote following Stewart and Gillespie, on the theory that their primary was an early test of the Trump era’s most pressing political question: whether the unorthodox new president represents a long-term political realignment or just a weird one-off. Had Gillespie walked away with the primary as expected, it might have been evidence that the Republican fever had broken, and that the GOP was looking to return to business as usual with sensible, practical candidates rather than race-baiting firebrands.</p><p>Virginia isn’t exactly Trump country: The state went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Trump won the state’s primary by a narrow margin over Marco Rubio. Despite its Southern geography, Virginia today is an urban, transient, diverse, highly educated state, where many local Republican activists are wealthy consultants and lobbyists like Gillespie. When I went to see Gillespie campaign at a local fair, I met one such activist, a former mining-industry lobbyist who lives in the D.C. suburbs. Gillespie’s campaign was premised on the notion that Virginia Republicans were looking for a candidate who, while not openly repudiating Trump, was the polar opposite of Trump in temperament and orientation, emphasizing tax cuts and economic growth over culture-war controversies.</p><p>Stewart’s theory was the opposite: that Trump changed everything and showed what the GOP base was really looking for. Serving as the Trump campaign’s Virginia state chairman last October, he led activists in a march on the RNC headquarters, where he charged that the “establishment pukes” were undermining Trump’s campaign. (He was fired for the stunt.) Last weekend, Stewart told me he had warmed to Reince Priebus, the former RNC chairman now serving as White House chief of staff, but still believed the Republican establishment was hampering Trump’s presidency.</p><p>The Stewart supporters I spoke to, at a campaign rally in a diner in Fredericksburg, were galvanized by his nationalist message. There were numerous Confederate flag bumper stickers in the parking lot, and one woman wore a stars-and-bars hat with the word “REBEL.” They told me they were disgusted with Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, and put all their faith in Trump.</p><p>On Tuesday, there turned out to be a lot more of these types of Republican voters than Ed Gillespie expected.</p><p>Trump had an effect on the Democratic side of Tuesday’s primary as well. More than they competed on policy, the Democrats vied to be the most virulently anti-Trump, with the winner, Northam, airing an ad in which he called the president a “narcissistic maniac.” And Democrats were clearly energized: More than 540,000 turned out to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 370,000 in the Republican primary.</p><p>In Fredericksburg, I asked Stewart if he believed Trump had changed the face of American politics. “That’s what this election is going to help answer,” Stewart replied. “He certainly was a different kind of Republican. The question is, did that start a new era in Republican politics? Or are we going to revert back to the same old same old, with more establishment candidates winning nominations?”</p><p>Stewart, of course, believed he was going to win, and he didn’t. But in coming as close as he did, he gave the Republican establishment a scare—and showed that a sizable portion of the GOP base doesn’t want to go back to business as usual. Far from being weary of the controversial and unorthodox president, a lot of Republicans want more candidates like Trump.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedMike Segar / ReutersEd Gillespie narrowly won Tuesday's Republican gubernatorial primary in Virginia.Virginia's Wake-Up Call to the GOP Establishment2017-06-17T06:00:00-04:002017-06-19T10:12:05-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-530730Republican elites in the commonwealth thought their base would reject Trumpist politics. Instead, the establishment favorite nearly lost to a Trump-style provocateur.<p>FREDERICKSBURG, Va.—“They’ve been calling me a racist for 10 years,” Corey Stewart sighs, as if the commonness of the accusation were proof it couldn’t possibly be true. “They have! And it’s like, it doesn’t even faze me. I know the truth. They’re just used to it.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p>Stewart, a Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, sits across the table from me at a Greek diner where he has just impressed a roomful of right-wing voters with his message of populist provocation. His signs say, “Take Back Virginia,” a slogan intended to echo Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.</p><p>A beefy man in a dark-blue suit, Stewart chaired Trump’s Virginia campaign last year—until, that is, he was fired in October for staging a protest against the “establishment pukes” at the Republican National Committee in D.C., whom he accused of sabotaging Trump’s campaign. In Tuesday’s primary, Stewart is regarded as the underdog. But to hear him tell it, it is Trump’s brand of politics that is on the ballot.</p><p>“This is the question: Did the Donald Trump revolution stop in 2016?” Stewart asked the group gathered in the diner. “Or did it continue in the commonwealth of Virginia? Because if it works here, it will work everywhere else.”</p><p>The primary pits Stewart and another Republican candidate against Ed Gillespie, a former RNC chairman and partner in one of DC’s biggest lobbying firms—you might call him the personification of the Beltway “swamp” Trump has vowed to drain. Stewart, a county board chairman in the exurban Prince William County, has three major themes: his embrace of Trump; his decade-long crackdown on illegal immigration; and his opposition to the removal of Confederate monuments, which has made him an ally of white supremacists and the alt-right.</p><p>In Fredericksburg, where the Confederate army led by Robert E. Lee won a bloody Civil War battle in 1862, Stewart got hearty cheers for his opposition to “this politically correct madness of sanitizing history.” He described it as a leftist crusade that would not stop until it had deleted the Founding Fathers themselves from the national memory.</p><p>It has been seven months since Trump shocked the world by winning the presidency, and American politics remains unsettled and contested terrain in the wake of his victory. The jury is still out on what it meant—did Trump fundamentally scramble the old alignments and render the old way of doing politics obsolete? Or was his triumph a one-off, a fluke, an exception? No one is more invested in puzzling out the answers than politicians, whose careers depend on their ability to adapt to this strange new environment.</p><p>Virginia, one of two states to hold odd-year elections, will shed some of the first light on those questions. Trump has exerted a gravitational pull on both sides of the race. The close and hotly contested Democratic primary is being watched as a proxy for the battle for the soul of the modern left, with a progressive former congressman, Tom Perriello, mounting an insurgent challenge to the establishment-backed lieutenant governor, Ralph Northam.</p><p>On the Republican side, Gillespie is seen as the overwhelming front-runner. A <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/05/15/National-Politics/Polling/release_470.xml?uuid=BJtgwDmzEeelmybgRRqW_Q">poll</a> last month put him 20 points ahead of Stewart, 38 percent to 18 percent, with a third candidate pulling 15 percent and a quarter of likely primary voters still undecided. To Stewart, nominating Gillespie would be a disaster for the GOP, which last won the governorship in 2009.</p><p>“It is a losing strategy,” he told me. “It’s the party going back to business as usual. And it’s so boring! These establishment candidates, they’ve been saying the same things since the 1980s.” Trump, he said, gave the party a new road map for winning white working-class voters. “If we go back to nominating hoity-toity, non-controversial establishment candidates like Ed, we lose all those people.”</p><p>I had many interesting conversations about the Civil War with the attendees at Stewart’s event, most of them older white people, many of them transplants from other states who had worked for federal or local government. Stewart himself is originally from Minnesota, a fact that has earned him quite a bit ridicule, particularly when he tweeted, in April, “Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don't matter.”</p><p>He told me he feels all the more strongly about Virginia’s history as a “Virginian by choice,” and insisted his campaign is an appeal to the historical sensibility of all races—not, as it might seem, a naked embodiment of the worst liberal stereotypes about the GOP’s reliance on white identity politics.</p><p>The Civil War, Stewart told me, was fought “in part” over slavery, but was “more an issue of state’s rights”; Robert E. Lee was “a historic figure who after the war was over worked to reunify the country.” (My colleague Adam Serwer recently <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/?utm_source=feed">thoroughly examined</a> such claims about Lee’s historical legacy.) But the larger point, he said, was “this movement to destroy sculpture, public art, to sanitize history—I think that most people, regardless of their race, find that disturbing.”</p><p>Trump has not taken sides in the contest, though Stewart has released a list of endorsements from Trump campaign veterans, some of whom are working on his campaign. Gillespie, for his part, has staked his campaign on an opposing theory of the case, betting that what Virginia Republicans want is an antidote to Trump: practical, conventional, inoffensive, and most of all electable, in a state that bucked the GOP wave and went for Hillary Clinton in 2016.</p><p>Fueled by job growth in the D.C. suburbs, Virginia has undergone a rapid demographic and political transformation in recent years. More than half of the state’s residents are now non-native; the population is heavily college-educated, with large numbers of immigrants and African Americans. In the <em>Post</em> poll last month, 59 percent of Virginians disapproved of Trump, 52 percent of them strongly. Trump narrowly won the Virginia GOP primary last year, with 35 percent of the vote, and still has the approval of 77 percent of Virginia Republicans. (The former FBI director James Comey lives in Virginia and has been a registered Republican, but did not vote in 2016.)</p><p>The new face of Virginia was evident when I followed Gillespie to a county festival in Northern Virginia on Sunday. As I waited for the candidate at the Fairfax County Republican Party’s booth, a group of dark-skinned women in headscarves and long robes approached, gladly accepting paper fans bearing the name of a candidate for county supervisor handed out by a volunteer in a white Make America Great Again hat. Another volunteer, a retiree named Tom Altmeyer, told me he’d been pals with Gillespie since Altmeyer’s days as a lobbyist for the mining industry.</p><p>Gillespie strode down the sun-drenched fairway in a striped shirt with rolled-up sleeves, sunglasses perched atop his side-parted gray hair. A tall man in khaki shorts and suede loafers eagerly shook his hand, telling him he was eager to cast his vote for Gillespie as a newly naturalized American citizen from South Africa.</p><p>“I’m confident that our message is resonating everywhere—people like the specific policies I’ve put forward to get Virginia growing again,” Gillespie told me, as screams emanated from a roller coaster behind us. His message is focused on economic issues, which he says are more important to voters here than the polarizing cultural issues Stewart emphasizes. To the charge that he has distanced himself from the president, Gillespie replies, “I voted for President Trump. I want President Trump to succeed in creating jobs and making us more safe as a nation. But the governorship is about state politics.”</p><p>Stopping by the booth of a local Baptist church, Gillespie fell into conversation with two church volunteers who wanted to know his stance on abortion. (He opposes it, with some exceptions, and has been endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee.) They had, they said, been receiving lots of confusing robo-calls talking about issues like sanctuary cities and transgender bathrooms—were those coming from his campaign?</p><p>Gillespie laughed. “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s the other guy.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedSteve Helber / APRepublican gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart, speaks during a Tea Party debate at Goochland High School in Goochland, Va. in April 2017.Can a Trump-Style Republican Win in Virginia?2017-06-13T09:34:50-04:002017-06-13T10:20:52-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-530109The state’s gubernatorial primaries Tuesday will be an early test of how Trump has changed the political environment.<p>ANGOLA, Ind.—The congressman and I were sitting in the back of a car somewhere between Auburn and Fort Wayne, Indiana, when I turned and asked him the day’s most pressing political question: What did he think of “covfefe”?</p><p>Representative Jim Banks, a Republican serving his first term in Congress, was momentarily at a loss for words.</p><p>“I—I haven’t had time to think about it,” said Banks, who had spent the day so far doing normal congressman things: touring local businesses, checking in with local leaders, speaking at the Rotary Club. Notably, none of his constituents had yet brought up the president’s inscrutable midnight keystrokes. But while Banks was motoring earnestly around Northeast Indiana, covfefe had acquired a pronunciation, an etymology, a proliferation of interpretations. It had become a full-fledged scandal, complete with battle lines.</p><p>These are weird times to be a Republican lawmaker. On the one hand, your party is in charge of basically everything. On the other, your president and ostensible leader is Donald Trump, and you never know what he is going to do or say or tweet on any given day—but whatever it is, it is eventually going to land in your lap.</p><p>These days, you can blink and miss an entire Trump-related controversy. They blow in and out like an autumn wind, leaving little trace. (There are others, of course, more lasting and consequential.) And so poor Jim Banks had been too busy doing his job to fully grasp the significance of covfefe, or to be briefed about where he ought to come down on it. “Should I—should I be thinking more deeply about that?” he asked me, beseechingly.</p><p>Banks, a straitlaced 37-year-old former state legislator, wore a blue-and-brown plaid blazer and a Fitbit on one wrist. His short, nut-brown hair was lacquered sharply back from his forehead. Thinking some more about the matter at hand, he settled on two potential explanations. “It’s either that he’s authentic and fat-fingered a tweet, or that he’s unserious about how he communicates,” Banks said. Between the two alternatives, he declined to choose.</p><p>A first-term back-bencher from a safe Republican district, Banks is not exactly the Great GOP Hope. To the extent he is regarded at all in Washington, it is as a serious but not particularly flamboyant up-and-comer. A self-described movement conservative and protégé of the irreverent Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, Banks voted for Trump “with reservations.” He disagrees with Trump on issues like foreign policy, trade, and fiscal policy, to name a few, but he voted for the president’s health-care bill, describing it as a step in the right direction.</p><p>He is, in other words, a fairly ordinary Republican congressman, trying to find his way in Washington in not-so-ordinary times.</p><p>On the other hand, it is his first term, so who is he to say this isn’t normal? “I don’t know the difference, really,” he told me at one point. “You could have told me it was just like this a year ago, and I would have believed you.”</p><p>During the day we spent traveling his district recently, Banks was frank with me about the challenge this poses. Six months into a job he had every reason to expect would consist mostly of opposition to the party in power, he has been protested by the liberal Resistance, and he has been yelled at by members of his own party who want him to be more pro-Trump. Given that 70 percent of his district voted for Trump in November, though, it is more often the latter.</p><p>“I don’t work for the president,” Banks told me. “Where were we, Paul, last week, when I was lambasted on that subject of whether or not I was going to blindly follow the president?”</p><p>From the front seat, Banks’s district director, Paul Lagemann, reminded him that it was a meeting of the Allen County Republican Party where he’d asserted his independence. Some in the room, Banks said, “felt that was maybe an act of disloyalty,” while others agreed with his stance.</p><p>“I’m trying to navigate it,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to navigate that tightrope. I’m choosing to approach my job by maintaining my independence, and maybe I’ll be defeated for doing so. But I also look into the future—I’m 37 years old, and I intend to be around in the post-Trump era, to continue to be a player in the conservative movement.”</p><p>I asked Banks if he believed there would still be a conservative movement post-Trump. “I believe that there will be,” he said.</p><p>In Angola, Indiana, where a quaint downtown of mom-and-pop stores wraps around a central traffic circle, Banks stopped at Sutton’s Deli to chat with the owner, John Sutton, a tall, buzz-cut man who emerged from the kitchen wearing a white apron. They talked in front of the ice-cream case, next to a poster of Lady Liberty and a bald eagle.</p><p>“Any questions about what the heck is going on in Washington?” Banks asked.</p><p>“It’s all good, isn’t it?” Sutton said.</p><p>“It turns out y’all sent me to Washington at an interesting time,” Banks replied. “I’m learning a lot.”</p><p class="dropcap">L<span class="smallcaps">ike so many Republicans last year</span>, Banks never saw Trump coming. He was a bright kid from a blue-collar background who met his wife in the College Republicans at Indiana University and learned conservatism from working for campaigns and free-market think-tanks.</p><p>Indiana, not usually a major primary state, ended up being the turning point of the 2016 GOP primary, as Ted Cruz made his last stand—supported by the state’s governor, Mike Pence—and dropped out after Trump steamrolled him. Banks, who voted for Cruz, also endured a tough primary, against a businessman who sold himself as a Trump-style political outsider and slammed Banks as a “career politician.”</p><p>The primary provided the first inkling that something odd was happening in the electorate in places like Northeast Indiana. Banks’s campaign had based its voter targets on a projected turnout of 80,000 to 100,000 voters. Instead, nearly 140,000 showed up, including a massive number who had never voted in a Republican primary before. Banks won narrowly, with 34 percent of the vote.</p><p>Quiet and thoughtful, Banks is not a man blessed with a surfeit of personality, and he describes himself as an introvert. He grew up in a trailer park in Columbia City, a small town 20 miles west of Fort Wayne, with a father who worked at an auto-parts factory and a mother who was a cook at a nursing home. Banks was the first member of his family to go to college, where he found the exposure to a new diversity of viewpoints inspiring.</p><p>After working on campaigns to put himself through college, he went into commercial real estate while climbing the ladder of local elected office. He also joined the Navy and served in Afghanistan during his last state senate term, while his wife, Amanda, replaced him in the legislature.</p><p>The people where he came from, Banks said, had a pervasive “sense that the deck was stacked against us.” He didn’t know how to match his belt to his shoes before he met his wife, or that it was possible to spend as much as $50 on a meal at a restaurant. “The idea that I could grow up and be a congressman one day would be outrageous where I came from,” he told me.</p><p>It occurred to me that the formality with which Banks carries himself was the posture of a man not born into the world he occupies, still warily feeling out its customs. Surrounded by local poo-bahs at civic events, he kept being asked whether he played golf, and kept having to politely demur. Banks’s district was once represented by former Vice President Dan Quayle. “I’m a little bit different from Dan Quayle,” he noted.</p><p>Two years ago, Banks recalled, he’d already begun hearing from family members who’d never previously offered him their political opinions, but who were firmly on board with Trump. “Over time, I realized there was something resonating there that I didn’t understand, I didn’t get as an ideological conservative,” he told me—a passion, he said, that led to plenty of difficult conversations, and that remains strong today.</p><p>Given the politics of his district, Banks has more to fear from a Republican primary challenge than from any Democrat, and he wonders if his party’s pro-Trump base will decide to take him on. “I think if I were going to have a primary, less than a year from now, it could be an opponent who runs on a more populist message—is more Trumpian, is that the right word?” But so far, he has seen no evidence of any person or group mobilizing against him.</p><p>Banks refers to the current chaos in Washington as “the frenzy,” a word he uses often as a sort of euphemism. “I have a sense that much of the frenzy is brought about by those who are trying to disrupt an agenda that I largely support,” he told me. “But much of it, as well, is brought about by unnecessary distractions created by the administration. It’s that frenzy environment that Republicans, at this point, are failing to look past so that we can get back on track and address the big issues.”</p><p>Banks’s stance on the federal investigations of Russian election meddling and the firing of the former FBI director, James Comey, is that the allegations are “troubling” and he supports the efforts to get to the bottom of them. “I don’t know where it leads,” he told me. “They have to lead somewhere, to a conclusion, and once there is a conclusion—the FBI investigation the congressional investigations—then members of Congress like myself can make better judgments about where to go from here.”</p><p>On the sunlit campus of Trine University, a private college in Angola, Banks listened as the school’s president, Earl Brooks, brought up his concerns. Brooks said he supported Trump’s lifting of some higher-education regulations. But he was worried about proposed cuts to the Pell Grants that help lower-income students attend colleges like Trine. The engineers and physical therapists who graduate from the school stay in the region, he said, helping reverse the area’s brain drain and bolster the economy.</p><p>The men paused under a poster of Bobby Knight, the firebrand former Hoosier basketball coach, who endorsed Trump before the Indiana primary and campaigned for him through November, when Trump took the state by nearly 20 percentage points. The picture reminded Banks of a slightly unflattering story about the president.</p><p>“When I met the president for the first time in the Oval Office, I had to get the obligatory photo behind the desk, and I asked if the vice president could be in the picture too,” Banks recalled. “The president asked me, ‘Did Bobby Knight or Mike Pence do me more good in Indiana?’ I said, ‘Definitely Bobby Knight.’</p><p>“I don’t know if Pence appreciated that. But the president looked at him and said, ‘See, I knew it!’”</p><p class="dropcap">J<span class="smallcaps">ust down Wayne Street</span> from downtown Angola, a payroll company bore a marquee reading, “CONGRESSMAN JIM BANKS WELCOME TO ANGOLA AND PAYSERV.” A big, bald, bearded man in jeans and a blue velvet blazer came half-limping, half-bounding out the front door. Todd Saylor, the company’s president and CEO, told Banks he had just had back surgery, but skipped taking his painkillers so he could drive through the night from Detroit, two and a half hours away, to meet Banks.</p><p>The men walked past a fluorescent-green wall bearing the words “Do you want to be average?!!!” and settled into a conference room. Saylor considered himself a Trump supporter, but he was worried about the effects of Trump’s immigration policies. Running a staffing company, he could see how many jobs were being left unfilled. “We have huge hiring rates—we can’t keep up,” Saylor said. “Why are we scaring people out with ICE? I’m Mr. Trump’s advocate, but we’re going to start running out of resources.”</p><p>Saylor gestured at a man sitting at a table in the front of the office. “That man walked in off the street, and we’re going to put him in a job today,” he said. “But what if he’s an immigrant? Why can’t I put him in my system? We can’t fill jobs fast enough, and there’s an employment force that wants to work.”</p><p>This was a consistent theme of Banks’s visits to local businesses: Many had more jobs than people to hire. He heard it at Sutton’s Deli; he heard it at the Nucor steel plant in Waterloo. In Indiana, where the unemployment rate is just 4 percent, Banks sees more prosperity than despair. We were deep in the American heartland, deep in Trump country, but it was not quite the landscape Trump describes, the “American carnage” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”</p><p>Banks heard over and over again from constituents who supported Trump in theory—but were counting on him to preserve the federal grant that keeps them afloat, protect the military base that supplies local jobs, bolster the drug-treatment program for local opioid addicts, secure more funding for local roads and bridges. He criticized the meager increase in defense spending Trump has proposed, which he said “falls far short of addressing our military readiness crisis.” But he also said it will be necessary to make tough choices to address the national debt, and criticized Trump’s refusal to cut entitlement programs.</p><p>The day before, Banks told me, he spoke to a local businessman who sang the praises of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has called a job-killing horror. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump nixed shortly after taking office, also would have been a boon to the area’s agricultural exporters.</p><p>The slow pace of Washington frustrates Banks, who told me he was known in the Indiana statehouse as a “prolific” author of bills addressing issues large and small—bills that, with a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both houses, often made it into law. He spoke proudly of tax cuts, right-to-work legislation, and eliminating the state’s inheritance tax.</p><p>He could see little leadership from the White House, and wasn’t sure Congress had what it took to pick up the slack. “I respect Paul Ryan—he’s certainly wonky and thoughtful,” Banks told me. “In this short period of time, I don’t have a good sense of how strategic he is at managing the process.”</p><p>At a meeting of local leaders in Auburn, Banks heard from superintendents worried about education funding and a foundry owner concerned about skilled workers retiring. The local prosecutor, ClaraMary Winebrenner, said crime would fall if people had more incentives to work. Afterwards, I chatted with her about Banks, whom she found impressive, and Washington, which she did not.</p><p>“I figure it’s going to implode,” she said. “We’ve reached a point of chaos at the national level.” And what, I asked, did she think of the president? Winebrenner laughed. “I don’t want to talk about the president,” she said. “I’m a Republican leader in this area, and I believe that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”</p><p>Back in the car, I asked Banks about immigration. He said he didn’t like Trump’s rhetoric, and that this region would need an influx of immigrants to remain economically viable. He talked about an interpreter he worked with in Afghanistan, who risked his life for American troops but hasn’t been able to get a visa to come to the U.S. “That’s a small part of the immigration debate, but for me, it embodied those who are willing to do extraordinary things to have a shot at the American dream, and we make it so difficult,” he said.</p><p>I could see why Trump supporters might be displeased with Banks. In our day together, he had expressed more criticism—albeit measured and cautious—than praise of the president. I asked him if he understood his constituents’ support for the president he found so flawed.</p><p>“They know that Trump is imperfect,” he said. “But they elected him, 70 percent of them, to reform the system that’s left so many Hoosiers behind.” When he criticizes the administration’s “unnecessary distractions,” he said, “that’s the point: These distractions are preventing us from moving forward an agenda that the voters also elected me to go to Washington to advocate for.” In his district in November, Banks won more votes than Trump, but not by much.</p><p>The voters here believe in Trump. They also believe in Jim Banks. He only hopes they don’t have to choose between the two.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedPaul Morigi / Getty / Katie Martin/ The Atlantic'Y’all Sent Me to Washington at an Interesting Time'2017-06-12T05:00:00-04:002017-06-12T10:30:11-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-529944A freshman Republican lawmaker tries to stay on the right side of his constituents—and his principles—deep in Trump Country.<p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he speaker of the House</span> strode to his lectern on a recent Thursday to confront another totally normal day on Capitol Hill: health care, tax reform, a president under investigation, rumblings of impeachment.</p><p>“Morning, everybody!” Paul Ryan chirped. “Busy week!”</p><p>It was indeed: Less than a day had passed since the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s involvement in the presidential campaign; just a few hours since President Trump angrily tweeted that the investigation was “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”; and only minutes since the Russia-linked former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had begun defying congressional subpoenas. A few days prior, the president had been accused of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?utm_term=.7316a1986021">revealing sensitive intelligence information</a> to the Russian foreign minister.</p><p>As Ryan earnestly touted his party’s work on “landmark federal IT reform legislation,” there was a grim, haunted look in his bright-blue eyes, and it wasn’t hard to imagine why. What ought to have been the salad days of Republican-led government had instead become a ceaseless, disorienting swirl of scandal, 120 days of self-inflicted chaos and crisis.</p><p>At the fifth question of the press conference—what was his view on the idea that Republicans might be better off with the vice president, Mike Pence, in the White House instead of Trump?—Ryan shook his head in exasperation. “Oh, good grief,” he said. “I’m not even going to give credence to that.”</p><p>“But your members are saying that!” the reporter said. Republican members of Congress were buzzing about this idea, openly wondering, as the presidential mess threatened to consume their careers and priorities, whether it might be possible to remove the president and move on.</p><p>Congress, Ryan insisted, was perfectly capable of doing its job. “I know people can be consumed with the news of the day,” he said, as though a potential impeachment were the latest celebrity scandal, or the time everyone was up in arms for 24 hours about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/05/15/dont-mess-with-millennials-avocado-toast-the-internet-fires-back-at-a-millionaire/?utm_term=.cc184b50d52a">avocado toast</a>. “But we are here working on people’s problems every day. We have all these committees that do different jobs, and our job is to make sure that we still make progress for the American people, and we’re doing that. It’s just not what we’re being asked about.”</p><p>Ryan listed more accomplishments underway—streamlining the Pentagon, sanctions on Syria, workforce-development programs—and insisted the House could “walk and chew gum at the same time.” But Trump’s troubles have cast a long shadow over the 291 members of his party in the House and Senate, who see their agenda going up in smoke in what is generally a presidential party’s most productive year.</p><p>A flawed, unpopular health-care bill is stalled in the Senate, the president’s budget proposal has been dismissed out of hand, and hope is fading for other priorities such as tax reform and infrastructure. “How do you pack all that in?” Senator John McCain <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans-push-forward-health-care-despite-lack-consensus-n764806">asked</a> last week, adding, “So far, I've seen no strategy for doing so. I'm seeing no plan for doing so.” One Republican congressman <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15457662/immigration-anxiety-trump-congress-action">suggested</a> that what was needed was for the president to throw “a temper tantrum” to get lawmakers to act—this congressman happened to be named Brat.</p><p>Meanwhile Democrats sit back and watch it burn, with no small amount of schadenfreude, and the Republicans who never liked Trump see their worst predictions fulfilled. “You bought this bad pony. You ride it,” the anti-Trump consultant Rick Wilson <a href="https://twitter.com/therickwilson/status/865212858942050304">tweeted</a> recently. A staffer to a Senate Republican who did not vote for Trump told me, “We didn’t have high expectations, so we’re not disappointed. We tried to warn you.”</p><p>But Paul Ryan, with his long-cultivated persona as the party’s resident idealist, has always had high expectations. He watched last year as Trump ate his party; now he must watch as the president consumes his dreams. “Paul wants to govern, he’s trying to get what’s possible to get done, and he’s got a lot of credibility on the line,” Ryan’s friend Jimmy Kemp, the son of the late former Representative Jack Kemp, told me. “He’s been working on these issues for so long.”</p><p>Kemp, who wrote in Ryan’s name on his presidential ballot, described the speaker as burdened but steady. “He’s frustrated and it’s wearing on him, but he’s not throwing in the towel,” he said. “He just has to answer questions about so many things he doesn’t want to answer questions about.”</p><p>For the Republicans running the government, Capitol Hill has become a workplace with extremely poor morale. The moderates fear for their careers, while the conservative true believers see little to hope for. When the liberal magazine <em>Mother Jones</em> credited Representative Justin Amash of Michigan with being the first Republican to raise the possibility of impeachment, the office of Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/lawmaker-insists-i-m-first-republican-raise-impeachment-n762031">called</a> to request a correction: Curbelo had gone there first.</p><p>But for the most part, his party has not openly turned on Trump. What would be the point? Behind closed doors, a longtime House Republican staffer told me, a few lawmakers still wholeheartedly defend the president; among the rest, there are differing degrees of fatalism. One group thinks it is possible to fight through the crisis, while another is resigned to “a long slow death,” as this staffer put it, potentially culminating in a Democratic-controlled House beginning impeachment proceedings in 2019. “This is like <em>Reservoir Dogs</em>,” the staffer said. “Everyone ends up dead on the floor.”</p><p class="dropcap">L<span class="smallcaps">ater that day</span>, a few hours after Ryan’s press conference, a dozen television cameras and perhaps 30 reporters crowded into the Capitol basement, where subway cars run from the building that houses the Senate to the buildings where senators keep their offices. In a secure chamber nearby, Rod Rosenstein—the deputy attorney general whose three-page memo had argued for the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, the previous week, and who had appointed the special counsel the day before—was briefing the senators.</p><p>The appointment of the counsel, Robert Mueller, was a glimmer of hope to Republicans badly in need of it. Several GOP staffers described the feeling to me in the same terms—a nearly audible “sigh of relief” that swept through a Capitol on edge. For a while, new developments related to the Comey firing had been coming at such a furious pace that the Capitol press corps nearly turned into a mob. Roving swarms of cameras and microphones pursued lawmakers, prompting Capitol administrators to send a memo warning, “Collectively, press following senators have become large and aggressive. We are concerned someone may get hurt.”</p><p>The senators crossed the microphone gauntlet as they trickled out of the Rosenstein briefing. Lindsey Graham, the jocular, Trump-skeptical South Carolinian, was asked about the president’s <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/trump-says-appointment-of-special-counsel-hurts-our-country-terribly.html">statement</a> that the special counsel “hurts our country terribly.” “Well, he’s entitled to his opinion,” Graham said. “If I were the president, I’d focus on defending the nation and trying to get his legislative agenda through the Congress.”</p><p>The Mueller appointment meant different things to different Republicans. To those wary of Trump, it put the investigation in the hands of someone they trusted to do the job seriously—critics had charged that congressional Republicans were not exactly pulling out the throttle to investigate their own party’s president. For members more publicly loyal to the president, it took the heat off, at least for the moment.</p><p>The White House had not been giving them much to go on to answer all those unpleasant questions: The previous day’s list of talking points issued to congressional Republicans urged them to take up the president’s claim that the leaks were the real scandal. The document included a numbered section entitled “Top Ten Politically Motivated Criminal Leaks of Classified Information.” (A House Republican staffer likened this defense to “It’s not that I’m beating my wife, it’s that my kids are telling the cops about it.”) But now they could simply say that the whole thing was out of their hands.</p><p>Inside the briefing, some Democrats <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/05/18/behind-closed-doors-al-franken-kirsten-gillibrand-blast-rosenstein-for-withholding-information/?utm_term=.cf7362ac45c4">pressed</a> Rosenstein for more information, and once they emerged, they declared themselves less than satisfied by his answers. “He declined to answer in any meaningful way questions about the process that led to the decision to fire Jim Comey—the preparation of his memo, who he consulted, who told him to prepare it—we must have asked that question about 25 different ways,” said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware.</p><p>Democrats stressed the importance of continuing the congressional investigations and having them in the open. “The public deserves a strong, open, public oversight by Congress on how Russia was trying to influence our country, and whether it is still trying influence our country,” declared Pat Leahy of Vermont.</p><p>“There is mounting evidence of obstruction of justice,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. “The special counsel must pursue all the evidence.”</p><p>Democrats and Republicans alike praised the choice of Mueller. The Republicans, as they emerged, were more apt to stress the importance of deferring to him: “Director Mueller, as special counsel, is doing this investigation, and we don’t want to do anything to get in the way,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas. With all of the oversight investigations occurring in various committees and subcommittees, he said, “that is a train wreck waiting to happen.”</p><p>Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was asked whether the Rosenstein briefing had made him more or less “comfortable” with the events of the week. “Well, I don’t know if it’s a level of comfort,” he said. “I think it’s a level of the fact that we are a nation of laws, and we have institutions, and irrespective of people’s political views, those laws and those rules are going to be followed.”</p><p>As Rubio walked away from the microphones, I asked him if he thought Trump’s presidency was in crisis. He blinked and mumbled, “Um, we’re not at that point,” before dashing away.</p><p class="dropcap">I<span class="smallcaps">t has become a Capitol Hill cliché</span> lately that the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like years. Lulls in the news feel ominous, and you never know what is going to happen. Tempers are fraying: the GOP’s congressional candidate in Montana’s special election last week tackled a reporter for pressing for his position on health care (and still won the election). “There is total weirdness out there,” Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina <a href="https://twitter.com/mikedebonis/status/867779339626196992?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Farchives%2F2017%2F05%2F25%2Fmark-sanford-gianforte-reporter-trump-unleashed-demons%2F">said</a> after the Montana incident. Trump, Sanford said, had “unearthed some demons.”</p><p>As the senators hurried away from their briefing, Trump was holding a press conference of his own. He once again decried the “witch hunt,” declared there had been “no collusion” with the Russians, and expressed surprise at the controversy over the firing of Comey, who “was very unpopular with most people.”</p><p>“I’m fine with whatever people want to do,” Trump said, “but we have to get back to running this country really, really well.”</p><p>In the White House, the mood consists of “panic and finger pointing,” one outside adviser told me, with shakeup rumors rampant and the palace intrigue as ugly and chaotic as it has been from the start. Attempts to get Trump to bring in an old Washington hand to impose order have failed. Instead, presidential strategists are <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-warroom-idUSKBN18M2FU">building</a> a “war room” to aggressively combat all the negative stories—a seeming admission that the administration considers itself to be in a permanent state of emergency.</p><p>Comey still plans to testify before Congress, though <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/special-counsels-office-coordinating-with-comey-team-on-scope-of-congressional-testimony/">no date has been set</a>. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is the subject of increasing scrutiny after revelations about his dealings with Russian representatives post-election. Trump’s strongest supporters may be <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-base-is-shrinking/">peeling away</a>, according to polls; those who remain <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nation-tracker-poll-core-trump-supporters-dig-in-others-grow-nervous/">say they support him</a> “partly because he is under fire,” and that they take it personally when Trump is criticized.</p><p>Trump spent last week out of town, on his first foreign trip, where he had tense interactions with such traditional American allies as Israel, the United Kingdom, and Germany. With the president away, life on Capitol Hill was markedly quieter. More than one Republican privately noted how much easier life was without him around. But, of course, he will be back.</p><p>Washington’s turbulence has yet to redound to the benefit of Democrats, and the Montana victory soothed some Republican nerves. But one GOP lobbyist wondered to me whether longtime members of Congress might soon take the opportunity to retire if the situation doesn’t improve. “You finally have united Republican government, and this is as good as it gets? Why bother?” he said. “A malaise is setting in.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / ReutersHow Trump Is Torturing Capitol Hill2017-05-29T06:00:00-04:002017-06-07T11:06:58-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-528426As Republicans in Congress try to fend off the flurry of scandals, they are haunted by a question: Is this as good as it’s going to get?<p class="dropcap">A</p><p><span class="smallcaps">s Grover Norquist</span> dug into his egg-white frittata, he could barely contain his glee.</p><p>“If you try and explain American politics by looking at one election, even a presidential election, you miss the forest for the tree,” the founder of Americans for Tax Reform and longtime liberal bogeyman told me over an early-morning breakfast, spearing halves of grape tomato with his fork. “It’s the most interesting tree in the forest—it’s got orange hair!—but it’s still just one tree.”</p><p>The Trump administration has many traditional conservatives in despair, convinced the president is trampling the Constitution and turning the Republican Party into something they don’t recognize. Not Norquist. He was the picture of a man who believes his time has come.</p><p>The ginger-haired 60-year-old’s eyes sparkled behind his wire-rimmed glasses as he described the rosy future he foresaw under Trump. It isn’t just that tax reform, Norquist’s signature issue, has risen to the top of the agenda for both the president and Congress. The 2016 election, as Norquist saw it, was not a mandate for Trump at all—it was a mandate for old-school Republicans, virtually all of whom got more votes than Trump in their states. (There’s an exotic corollary to this theory involving a new voting bloc of vaping enthusiasts—more about that later.) According to Norquist, whatever might be distracting Trump at any given moment, nothing less than a revolution of conservative governance was happening under his nose.</p><p>“Trump’s regulatory regime is Reaganite,” Norquist told me. “His tax cut is Reaganite. He’s more aggressive than Reagan on labor issues.” All that other stuff—the crazy tweets, the chaotic White House, the Russia investigation, the travel ban—is just noise. What Trump was really elected to do, Norquist maintained, were the things Republicans had been coveting for years. And Trump is already doing just those things.</p><p>Norquist is certainly not alone among Republicans rooting for Trump. Yet I was shocked to find him, of all people, so sanguine. Norquist has a Muslim wife, has spent years battling his party’s anti-Muslim fringe, and is a strong proponent of comprehensive immigration reform. (His neatly trimmed beard has even been cited as proof that he is a secret Muslim.) Trump has welcomed into the White House Islamophobic conspiracy theorists and proponents of immigration restriction. His campaign was powered by a populist-nationalist vision that had more to do with shutting out Mexicans than hemming in the regulatory state.</p><p>So what, Norquist as much as told me. What mattered was that he believes he is closer than he has ever been, after decades of struggle, to getting his famous wish—a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. And he may be right.</p><p>Norquist had just been at the White House, he noted, with a group of conservative activists the administration had brought in to consult.</p><p>“We’re working with the administration on the major economic stuff, so I feel very comfortable with the way they’re going,” he said. “Some conservatives who aren’t helping to row the boat don’t feel as comfortable,” because they don’t get the same assurances from the inside.</p><p>This was a veiled shot at the White House’s unhelpful conservative critics, but also a statement of Norquist’s strategy. By refraining from criticizing Trump, Norquist was positioning himself to continue to be in the rooms where policy is being made—unlike his unhelpful NeverTrump friends, who have reportedly been blacklisted.</p><p>He might be the cleverest man in the conservative movement. Or he might have sold his soul.</p><p class="dropcap">N</p><p><span class="smallcaps">orquist has never</span> minded being liberals’ antichrist; being irrelevant is another thing entirely. Yet this was where he found himself for most of last year’s presidential campaign. While the political world was consumed with Trump, he rarely commented on the race, preferring to tweet about his daughters, state-level politics, vaping, or Burning Man, the annual countercultural festival in the Nevada desert he has attended for the past three years.</p><p>Before 2016, Norquist had long had a starring role in national politics as a villain to liberals, who blamed his group’s tax pledge for Republicans’ refusal to compromise. Many a GOP incumbent, stretching back to the first President Bush, has lost reelection after breaking the promise never to raise taxes. Many more, Democrats contend, refuse to consider initiatives that are in the public interest because they fear Norquist’s disapproval. Arianna Huffington has called Norquist “the dark wizard of the anti-tax cult”; Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, said Republicans in Congress were being “led like puppets” by him.</p><p>The pledge not to raise taxes, Norquist contends, is a promise Republicans make to their voters, not to him. Republicans who won’t sign the pledge, Norquist likes to say, are like “rat heads in Coke bottles”: They ruin the brand’s reputation. As for the idea that he’s Republicans’ leader, he has joked, “I reject all conspiracy theories that have me sharing world domination with the Koch brothers. Sharing? Never.”</p><p>In 2016, however, Norquist was relegated to the sidelines, and early. His preferred presidential candidate, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, dropped out in September 2015. Norquist continued to pine for him nonetheless.</p><p>“Tonight I dine w/ 2016 GOP nominee, Gov. Scott Walker,” he tweeted. “He beat the union bosses, cut taxes, elected 3 times. Who would not nominate that.” This tweet was issued seven months after Walker left the race, shortly before Trump became the presumptive nominee.</p><p>Meanwhile, Norquist was fighting a personal, highly charged battle with his party’s Islamophobic fringe—a fight that continues to echo in the GOP’s post-election conflicts. Frank Gaffney, the head of an anti-Islam think tank, has spent nearly two decades attacking and harassing Norquist, claiming that Americans for Tax Reform is an Islamist front group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. He also contends that Norquist is gay. There is no apparent truth to Gaffney’s claims, but they have circulated widely on the right, championed by the likes of <em>Breitbart</em> and Glenn Beck.</p><p>In the past, Norquist has mostly won this intra-movement battle: He kicked Gaffney out of his influential Wednesday meetings of conservative activists, and had Gaffney barred from the Conservative Political Action Conference. In early 2016, Gaffney tried to get Norquist removed from the board of the National Rifle Association. Norquist’s allies waged an intense campaign on his behalf, and in May, he <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/national-rifle-association-norquist-gaffney-recall-trump">narrowly avoided</a> removal from the board on a 53-47 percent vote of more than 130,000 NRA members.</p><p>This was the reason I was so shocked to find Norquist cheering on Trump. Beyond the exhausting and annoying personal ordeal, his feud with Gaffney seemed to represent the ongoing battle for the soul of the Republican Party, with Norquist’s abstract, libertarian, economically focused agenda on one side and Gaffney’s paranoid, racially tinged vision on the other.</p><p>There is no denying that Trump’s rise has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/frank-gaffney-donald-trump-and-the-denationalization-of-american-muslims/519954/?utm_source=feed">empowered Gaffney and his allies</a>. Gaffney’s views have been embraced by officials now serving in the White House, such as presidential adviser Sebastian Gorka. Gaffney himself was an informal adviser to the Trump transition team. A man who represents everything Norquist doesn’t think the GOP should or does stand for—tribalism, xenophobia, identity politics—now has the ear of the Republican president.</p><p>To many, including some of his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/kellyanne-conway-trumpism/520095/?utm_source=feed">own strategists</a>, Trump won both the primary and general elections by ignoring conservative dogma and instead tapping into people’s resentment of minorities and foreigners. Many analysts, myself included, saw Trump's success as evidence that perhaps the true mainstream of the GOP was always more Gaffney than Norquist, more <em>Breitbart </em>than <em>National Review</em>. Influential Trump advisers like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller have declared that they want to reshape America’s political debate into one about American culture and nationalism, not the size of government.</p><p>Norquist dismissed my theory that the Gaffney-ites have gained the upper hand in Trump’s GOP. “The guys who make that case are a fringe,” he said. “I don’t think Trump will respond to that.” The travel ban, he claimed, was “temporary and limited.” Hostility to immigrants, Muslims, and foreign trade he chalked up to “a level of grumpiness in the electorate” that would subside once economic conditions improved—which they would, thanks to Trump’s Reaganite regulatory and tax initiatives.</p><p>“You get tax cuts and growth, and a lot of the challenges that people have on both immigration and trade become much less of a challenge, in terms of voters’ levels of grumpiness,” he said.</p><p>Norquist professes to have zero interest in any kind of racial politics. When, at one point, I made a joke about his “Scandinavian heritage,” based on his name, he responded flatly, “I am completely detribalized.” (Norquist’s grandparents came to the U.S. from Sweden.) Americans for Tax Reform advocated strongly on behalf of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate but stalled in the House of Representatives.</p><p>Norquist had polished off his frittata and was chewing on a toasted English muffin, pondering whether vitamin enthusiasts might be the next frontier in anti-FDA activism. He simply refused to accept that the libertarian goals he sought might come, under Trump, at the price of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim policies. It was impossible to tell whether his insistence on seeing only the parts of Trumpism he agreed with was willfully disingenuous or an act of extreme denial.</p><p class="dropcap">O</p><p><span class="smallcaps">r maybe Norquist</span> is right. He makes a strong case that Trump is a mere anomaly—the orange-haired tree—while what’s actually having an effect is a Republican Party that, Trump aside, is more right-wing, and more powerful, than ever.</p><p>Americans for Tax Reform’s agenda of limiting the federal government is well under way as virtually every Cabinet agency rolls back regulations—one of the few actual accomplishments of the bumbling new administration. The EPA is being gutted, the Federal Communications Commission is in the hands of a hard-core telecom libertarian, financial rules are being loosened. To be sure, Congress’s disastrous attempt to repeal Obamacare was a setback. But in the wake of that fiasco, Trump declared that he would move on to focus on tax reform.</p><p>Just imagine what it must be like to spend 30 years as the founder and president of an organization called Americans for Tax Reform and to finally have a president and Congress committed to tax reform as a top priority. It is the Washington policy-dork equivalent of winning the lottery—and changing the American fiscal landscape in the bargain. </p><p>It’s not just what’s happening in Washington that gladdens Norquist. Republicans also have unprecedented power at the state level. Americans for Tax Reform produces a map after every election showing which party controls each state, and Norquist handed me the latest version. It was redder than a blood-soaked towel. Twenty-five states are now totally in Republican hands, with a GOP governor and Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Democrats can claim similar ownership of just six states.</p><p>Republican candidates down the ballot, Norquist argues, stood for the party’s traditional platform of supply-side economics, not Trumpist populism—and most of them did better than Trump. “Half the country lives in a completely red state, OK?” Norquist said. “This is a wave that Trump caught—it’s not a tsunami he created.”</p><p>If Republicans listen to Norquist—and they generally do, or face the consequences—all those red states will push his agenda forward: lowering taxes, eliminating regulations, expanding gun rights. The withering of the labor movement will further kneecap Democrats, keeping them out of power for a generation. Wisconsin and Michigan have both seen union membership plummet after the enactment of “right-to-work” laws that made joining a union optional for government workers. Other Republican states are considering similar moves, and a Supreme Court case is pending that could impose right-to-work nationally, crippling unions for good.</p><p>“Seven million public-sector employees who pay between 4 and 8 billion dollars a year in dues—a third of them will quit,” Norquist said. “Now try funding the modern Democratic Party without union dues—good luck.”</p><p>Oh, and one other thing: The government will get its sticky hands off everyone’s electronic cigarettes.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">N</span></p><p><span class="smallcaps">orquist does not</span> smoke, e-cigarettes or the regular kind. But he views vaping regulation as a new libertarian cause and vapers as a new potential constituency. In fact, Norquist’s theory about why Republicans won in 2016 is not Hillary’s emails or Russia or James Comey or the forgotten white working class. He believes it was crossover votes from vapers.</p><p>Aside from his take on Trump, this was the topic I wanted to discuss at my breakfast with Norquist. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, I noticed, Norquist’s very active Twitter account, which has more than 65,000 followers, popped up regularly in my feed with out-of-the-blue statements like, “VAPING is a political movement.” In March 2016, as Trump and Ted Cruz were locked in the final stretch of their battle for the Republican nomination, Norquist tweeted: “Vape...then Vote....Vape...then Vote....Then Vape again.”</p><p>There are 10 million e-cigarette users in America, and they are passionately anti-vaping-regulation, even if they’re liberal on everything else. Norquist is working to move them into the Republican tent.</p><p>Norquist’s square-jawed press aide, John Kartch, who was seated next to him at our booth in a downtown D.C. hotel restaurant, reminded him about a vape-shop owner they’d met during the campaign. “He told us he was a lifelong Democrat, very left-wing—he personally hated you forever.”</p><p>“He didn’t say <em>hated</em>,” Norquist said, sounding slightly wounded.</p><p>But the man’s political orientation completely changed when he opened a vaping business and encountered a bunch of burdensome regulations, Kartch said. “He came to D.C. and presented Grover with a T-shirt.”</p><p>“Which I wore at Burning Man!” Norquist recalled. “I have the picture!”</p><p>“So, we picked up a lot of people who were probably center-left, if they voted at all,” Kartch said, this being the moral of the story.</p><p>“They have more tattoos than I do,” Norquist said archly. How high a bar is that?</p><p>“I have no tattoos,” Norquist admitted.</p><p>I asked Norquist how he could be so sure that vaping ought not be regulated, given that experts disagree on its potential health effects and much research remains to be done. “It’s none of the government’s goddamned business if it makes your nose fall off!” he said. He later clarified that rather than banning dangerous substances, the government should warn people and let them make their own decisions, as it does with alcohol and tobacco.</p><p>The vapers, Norquist contends, were pivotal in at least two swing states in 2016—one that Trump won, and one that he lost.</p><p>An Obama-era Food and Drug Administration regulation, if it isn’t repealed, would retroactively ban the vast majority of e-cigarettes. Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire’s Republican senator, refused to take a position on it. Although she led in most polls, Ayotte lost her bid for reelection in November by a minuscule margin—one-tenth of a point—and Trump lost the state.</p><p>Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, on the other hand, supports legislation to keep vaping legal. Johnson, who was behind in the polls, pulled off one of the election’s biggest upsets, winning reelection by 3.4 points. He arguably dragged Trump to victory in the state on his coattails: Trump won Wisconsin by just seven-tenths of a point.</p><p>Norquist believes the senators’ fates and their stances on vaping were not a coincidence. During the campaign, ATR sponsored a cross-country pro-vaping bus tour, and hammered the issue particularly hard in Wisconsin. “There’s a guy we worked with who went to every vaping shop in Wisconsin, reminding them that Senator Johnson was the No. 1 defender of vaping,” Norquist told me.</p><p>The idea that vapers were the key to the 2016 election struck me as exotic, to say the least. But this is Norquist’s theory of coalition politics, one he has pursued relentlessly for decades: There is always a new group to be brought into the tent of people who want to be left alone by the government. America’s 2 million homeschooling families. Fifteen million holders of concealed-carry gun permits, a number that’s triple the membership of the NRA. And now, 10 million vapers.</p><p>Later, I called Johnson’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, to ask if the vapers had been crucial to his win, expecting she would laugh me off the phone. But while she didn’t attribute victory to the vapers alone, she didn’t deny that they had helped. “It is something we got a huge swell of support around,” she said. The campaign targeted digital ads at vapers as a result.</p><p class="dropcap">N</p><p><span class="smallcaps">orquist’s trust in</span> Trump has put him at odds with many other conservative organizations. Americans for Tax Reform supported the failed House plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, on the grounds that it cut taxes; Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity all opposed the bill, despite a White House meeting at which the president personally asked for their support. Republicans in Congress didn’t take Norquist’s side. The other conservative groups’ opposition helped torpedo the legislation.</p><p>Yet Norquist is confident he will win the war. He told me he trusted Trump because of the time he had spent in his presence. He had met Trump four times: Once in 2012, when he viewed him as a potential donor. Once in July 2015, when Trump spoke at the libertarian FreedomFest in Las Vegas and met with Norquist privately. Once at a reception before Trump’s April 2016 foreign-policy speech at the Center for the National Interest. (This was apparently the same reception at which Trump notoriously met the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.) And finally, at the White House in January.</p><p>It was a conversation with Trump at their third meeting that stood out in Norquist’s mind. “He said, ‘Do you like my tax cut?’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s a fine tax cut,’” Norquist recalled. “And then he pointed at me and he said: ‘I’m with you 100 percent. I’m with you 100 percent. I’m with you 100 percent.’”</p><p>Norquist smiled, an impish, purse-lipped, cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “So, he’s with me 100 percent,” he said. “He said it three times. What could be clearer?”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersGrover Norquist, the Happiest Man in Washington2017-04-18T05:00:00-04:002017-04-26T16:11:28-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-523206The veteran conservative activist ought to be disturbed by the Trump administration. Why is he so optimistic—and what’s vaping got to do with it?<p>Kellyanne Conway is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/kellyannes-alternative-universe/517821/?utm_source=feed">best known as a spin artist</a>, a mascot, and a folk hero to Donald Trump voters—in other words, a high-profile spokeswoman. But there’s a deeper role she hasn’t gotten much credit for: a principal architect of the theory behind Trump’s winning campaign.</p><p>Years before Conway went to work on Trump’s campaign—when she was still a midlist conservative pollster and Steve Bannon was still running <em>Breitbart</em>—the two were charter members, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/kellyannes-alternative-universe/517821/?utm_source=feed">Bannon recently told me</a>, of the “cabal” he was forming behind the scenes to upend the Republican establishment. And Conway’s ideas were the key to a major shift in the way Trump addressed immigration, which became his signature issue.</p><p>One Conway poll in particular—a little-noticed 2014 messaging memo commissioned by a controversial anti-immigration group—Bannon cited as a sort of Rosetta stone of the message that powered Trump’s victory. It was, Bannon told me, a pillar of “the intellectual infrastructure of the populist movement that candidate Trump galvanized” from the moment he began his candidacy in 2015.</p><p>Conway’s role in shaping Trump’s political strategy is among the themes of my <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/kellyannes-alternative-universe/517821/?utm_source=feed">profile of her</a> in <em>The Atlantic</em>’s April issue, and it bears a deeper look. She played a key part in shaping the counterintuitive political theory—dismissed at the time by both Republicans and Democrats—that ended up putting Trump in the White House. That makes Conway a central figure in the political realignment Trump pulled off in 2016, far more than the mere talking head many take her for.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>The story begins in the aftermath of the 2012 election, which Mitt Romney lost after receiving just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. The Republican National Committee responded with a now-infamous report that’s come to be known as the “autopsy,” which urged the party to rebrand itself with women, young people, and minorities, or face a demographic death spiral. It made only one policy recommendation: to attract Hispanic voters, the party must embrace immigration reform.</p><p>Romney had taken a hard line on immigration, at one point urging “self-deportation”—that is, making it harder for undocumented immigrants to work in the U.S. so they would willingly return to their home countries. Post-election, commentators across the political spectrum blamed Romney’s loss on this stance.</p><p>One such commentator was then-reality-TV-star Donald Trump. “He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Donald-Trump-Ronald-Kessler/2012/11/26/id/465363/">told</a> the conservative website <em>Newsmax</em>. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”</p><p>The effort to get Republicans behind immigration reform almost worked. In the Senate, a bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” including Marco Rubio, drafted legislation that was backed by a broad coalition, from the Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO. It passed the Senate with 68 votes, including 14 Republicans.</p><p>But it still had to get through the House of Representatives. Aware that Republican members of Congress feared a backlash from their base, immigration reformers labored to convince them that reform was politically popular—and that it was the only way for the GOP to have a prayer of winning another presidential election.</p><p>In 2014, FWD.us, the immigration-advocacy group backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, recruited a who’s who of prominent Republican pollsters to make the reform-or-die argument, in a last-ditch push to get reform legislation through the House. The 10 pollsters concluded that supporting the Gang of Eight bill would help Republicans with swing voters without hurting them with their base. “Supporting this new immigration reform proposal should be good electoral politics for Republicans,” they <a href="https://www.fwd.us/blog/poll_voters_support_immigration_reform">wrote</a> in a joint memo. One of the 10 was Kellyanne Conway.</p><p>The report was scheduled for release to the media on June 11, 2014. On June 10, a political meteor hit: Then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated in his Republican primary by a little-known challenger who had hammered him for being soft on immigration. Any hope for immigration reform died that day. Many Republicans worried their party’s 2016 presidential hopes had died, too. Without immigration reform, the head of the Chamber of Commerce <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/chamber-of-commerce-2016-election-immigration-106577">said</a>, the party might as well not bother to run a presidential candidate at all.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>The FWD.us poll was not Conway’s first work on immigration—she had been researching voters’ attitudes on the subject for decades. But she was generally on the other side, working for some of immigration reform’s most extreme opponents, and arguing that Republicans’ political success would come from taking a harder, not softer, position.</p><p>Since the 1990s, Conway had conducted polling for the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and NumbersUSA, all of which advocate for reducing immigration levels. The Southern Poverty Law Center refers to the troika as “the nativist lobby”—an accusation the groups strongly dispute. Though many in the D.C. consultant class consider these groups too radioactive to work with, they have formidable grassroots support across the country.</p><p>As a pundit, too, Conway had long argued that Republicans could win votes with a hard line on immigration. In a 2006 blog post at <em>National Review Online</em>, for example, Conway wrote that immigration was “a dominant issue on talk radio and around kitchen tables in many areas” that was “all but ignored by both political parties.” Her polling, she wrote, found overwhelming support for a policy of “tighter border security and stricter enforcement of current immigration laws to encourage illegal immigrants to go home over time”—essentially, self-deportation.</p><p>Fast-forward to August 2014. Just two months after signing onto the Zuckerberg group’s Republicans-must-reform-or-perish memo, Conway came out with a <a href="http://images.politico.com/global/2014/08/19/immigration_poll_0819.pdf">new poll</a> that seemed to make the opposite argument. There was, she wrote, “strong consensus on many populist immigration policies,” including enforcing current immigration law, limiting illegal immigrants’ access to welfare and work, and reducing legal immigrants’ ability to bring family members to the United States.</p><p>The issue, she wrote, should be framed in terms of “America First,” and as a matter of “fairness … to blue-collar workers.” Three-quarters of likely voters, she pointed out, wanted more enforcement of current immigration laws. (Most economists agree that low-skilled immigration displaces some native-born workers while improving the economy and creating more net jobs overall. And while majorities of voters of both parties consistently oppose deporting the undocumented en masse, majorities generally also oppose increasing the number of legal immigrants.)</p><p>Conway told me her argument was intended as an explicit rebuttal to the “autopsy” report. “Candidates had been told after 2012, because Mitt Romney only got 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, that they had to support comprehensive immigration reform,” she told me. “We were telling them, ‘That’s not true.’” Non-college-educated white voters, in particular, supported the idea that illegal immigration was hurting their ability to find work, she said.</p><p>Conway made an effort to get her poll noticed, but it surfaced in the media only in an article in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/08/20/poll-voters-want-immigration-pause-more-enforcement-preference-given-to-us-workers/"><em>Breitbart</em></a> (which hailed it as a “blockbuster”) and a <em>Politico Pro</em> article available only to paid subscribers. She personally handed a copy to Ted Cruz, and discussed it on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. At a private meeting of big GOP donors in Chicago, she urged adoption of the anti-immigration message. But the donors didn’t want to hear it, as Conway later <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-voters.html?_r=0">told <em>The New York Times</em></a>: “They wanted labor and they wanted votes.”</p><p>Interestingly, while it was Conway who first told me about her 2014 poll, she was cagey about who had sponsored it. Her own company’s name was on the polling memo, and when I asked her who paid for it, she said it was “Creative Response Concepts”—the full name of a prominent conservative public-relations firm better known in D.C. by its acronym, CRC. But who was paying CRC? I called NumbersUSA, a CRC client, and got the answer: “That’s our poll,” the group’s executive director, Roy Beck, said proudly.</p><p>NumbersUSA advocates dramatically reducing legal immigration levels and cracking down on undocumented immigrants’ employment. Its positions are diametrically opposed to those of FWD.us. That Conway took a paycheck from both groups within months of each other was surprising—like advising Planned Parenthood one day and National Right to Life the next.</p><p>When I asked Conway about the apparent contradiction, she said she had participated in the FWD.us group in an effort to “improve on the questions being asked and the assumptions being made.” It was the NumbersUSA poll, she said, that better reflected her views: “The second effort was a much more comprehensive body of qualitative and quantitative work.”</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>One person who noticed Conway’s August 2014 poll was Bannon, who at the time was the CEO of <em>Breitbart</em>. Bannon had also been pondering another counterargument to the “autopsy” theory: the work of Sean Trende, a respected elections analyst for <em>RealClearPolitics</em>, who had dived into the 2012 numbers and come up with a different conclusion than the RNC’s.</p><p>White working-class voters, Trende <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/06/21/the_case_of_the_missing_white_voters_revisited_118893.html">found</a>, had stayed home in large numbers in 2012—particularly “downscale, Northern, rural whites,” who likely saw no appealing option between the “urban liberal” Barack Obama and the “severely pro-business venture capitalist” Romney. Immigration reform might be good policy, he wrote, but there was a path to victory for Republicans that didn’t require more Hispanic votes: they could instead find a way to bring back the “missing white voters.”</p><p>Trende’s theory was descriptive, not prescriptive. But when Bannon put it together with Conway’s research, it suggested a political formula: a presidential campaign targeting working-class whites, with a message spotlighting opposition to immigration. Bannon framed it as remaking the GOP into the party of the American worker, the “forgotten man”; less sympathetic observers have termed it white identity politics. (Trende, for his part, told me he never envisioned his theory being used in this way.)</p><p>Trump launched his campaign with a tirade about Mexican drug-dealers and rapists (possibly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/magazine/how-donald-trump-set-off-a-civil-war-within-the-right-wing-media.html">inspired</a> by Ann Coulter). This wasn’t quite what NumbersUSA wanted to hear—the group’s focus is on jobs. Early in his candidacy, Trump earned a C-minus on the report card NumbersUSA maintained on all the candidates. “At first [Trump’s message] was all about crime and terrorism,” NumbersUSA’s Beck told me. “But he just kept improving, focusing his message more and more on what was good for the worker.” By August 2015, Trump had issued an immigration <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/16/donald-trump-releases-immigration-reform-plan-designed-to-get-americans-back-to-work/">policy paper</a> that strongly echoed the Bannon-Conway line.</p><p>It wasn’t just Trump. Conway’s messaging, Beck told me, “became the blueprint for any number of Republican presidential candidates” in 2015: Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz—even Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush turned more conservative on the issue. Cruz (whom Conway supported in the primaries) performed a particularly conspicuous flip-flop: Having once argued passionately in the Senate for increasing visas for highly skilled workers, as a presidential candidate he called for reducing them. Advocates for immigration reform, Democrat and Republican alike, were puzzled at the time by the GOP field’s collective turn toward policies they considered general-election poison.</p><p>Within Trump’s orbit, Bannon’s “cabal” kept gaining influence. Stephen Miller, an aide to then-Senator Jeff Sessions who had been known in Congress for his work to stop the Gang of Eight bill, joined Trump in January 2016 and remains, along with Bannon, his chief ideologue and speechwriter. (On the other hand, Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman who commissioned the “autopsy,” is the White House chief of staff.) Bannon and Conway officially took the reins of the Trump campaign last August.</p><p>Bannon’s political formula worked. Trump won the election by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/upshot/why-trump-won-working-class-whites.html">galvanizing working-class white voters</a> in Rust Belt states that had previously belonged to Democrats. To Conway, his victory was a vindication of her long-held theory, and a refutation of the elite consensus of both parties, particularly on immigration. “So much of what I talked about for years in the Republican Party, long before I was [Trump’s] campaign manager,” was “leveraged into a platform” by Trump, she told me. “I talked about it for years, and it’s all in the public record.”</p><p>Her insights, Conway told me, stemmed from her research, but also from her roots in rural New Jersey and her understanding of working-class people. They were people like her own mother (whom I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/kellyannes-alternative-universe/517821/?utm_source=feed">interviewed</a> in my profile), who never went to college and worked a night shift in an Atlantic City casino until her back gave out.</p><p>“Every time I went to a Trump rally, I saw in the faces in the crowd everybody I grew up with,” Conway told me. At rallies in Pennsylvania, “sometimes it was <em>literally</em> the people I grew up with.”</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>One conclusion to draw from all of this is that Conway is more than just a flack for Trump. There is a tendency not to take her seriously as a strategist that may have to do with her gender, as former Hillary Clinton adviser Jennifer Palmieri—no fan of Conway’s—recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/kellyanne-conway-sexist-political-criticism.html">told the <em>Times</em></a>: While Bannon is generally portrayed as the shadowy mastermind, Conway gets skewered as a bimbo. Yet Trump himself seems to see Conway largely as a spokeswoman: She repeatedly refused his attempts to make her White House press secretary, and she told me she makes more television appearances than she’d prefer because he likes her public advocacy.</p><p>Another conclusion is that Trump’s political strategists consider immigration restriction to be at the heart of his electoral appeal. It is the major dividing point between his philosophy and that of the erstwhile GOP establishment. Conway told me Trump had fundamentally changed the terms of the immigration debate. “The conversation before was, ‘What is fair to the illegal immigrant?’ Are you ripping families apart? Should the DACA kids stay? Should they have driver’s licenses?” she told me. “Now, the conversation is also, ‘What’s fair to the American worker?’ What’s fair to the local economy? What’s fair to law enforcement? What is fair all the way around?”</p><p>But does Trump actually believe all the words that have been put in his mouth? “No, of course not,” Newt Gingrich recently <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-political-lexicon-of-a-billionaire-populist/2017/03/09/4d4c2686-ff86-11e6-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html?utm_term=.28452794a41d">told the <em>Washington Post</em></a>, referring to Bannon’s nationalist theories more generally. “The president has a very broad sense of what he wants America to be. His philosophy is based on four basic principles: anti-left, anti-stupidity, anti-political correctness, pro-American,” Gingrich said.</p><p>Trump may be personally squishier on immigration than the ideologues writing his speeches. To the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/us/politics/daca-dreamers-immigration-trump.html">anguish of the anti-immigrant right</a>, he has waffled on DACA, Obama’s executive order protecting young illegal immigrants from deportation. He could rescind it with the stroke of a pen, but has said he is struggling with the “very, very difficult” decision. And in a recent lunch with news anchors, he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/09/politics/trump-immigration-gang-of-eight/">speculated</a> about restarting comprehensive immigration reform, setting off a brief firestorm.</p><p>Trump is good at getting people to hear what they want to hear in his often-conflicting pronouncements, and immigration reformers are no exception. A prominent member of the RNC told me he still cherishes the hope that Trump will push the Gang of Eight bill, as a sort of Nixon-to-China move.</p><p>Based on the influence of people like Conway, that seems like wishful thinking. But as Trump himself <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/29/trump-on-nyt-interview-leak-everythings-negotiable/?utm_term=.ca34f51a0d7b">said last year</a>, when he was caught on tape contemplating a softer immigration policy: “Everything is negotiable.”</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersThe Unsung Architect of Trumpism2017-03-20T05:00:00-04:002017-04-26T09:26:54-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-520095Kellyanne Conway’s theory that Republicans could win a presidential election with an anti-immigration message had a major influence on Trump’s platform—and his win.<p class="dropcap">E<span class="smallcaps">ven in triumph, </span>Kellyanne Conway nursed a grudge. As she reflected on Donald Trump’s November victory, she made clear that she hadn’t forgotten how people treated her back when they thought she was a sure loser. Their attitude wasn’t one of outright rudeness or contempt; it was so much worse than that. It was syrupy condescension—the smarmy, indulgent niceness of people who think they’re better than you.</p><p>“ ‘Kellyanne works hard,’ ” Conway said, assuming the voice of her erstwhile sympathizers. “ ‘We all love Kellyanne, but this is a fool’s errand.’ Or ‘She’s done a really nice job, she should hold her head high, but this is just happy talk’ … You know, it was some combination of that. It was ‘We love her, but she’s full of shit.’ ”</p><p><i class="audm--listen-cta">Listen to the audio version of this article:</i><iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/310550300%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-wFUIh&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">Feature stories, read aloud: <a href="https://goo.gl/t9bfyO">download the Audm app for your iPhone.</a></i></p><p>Conway flashed a wicked grin. We were sitting in her spacious office in the West Wing of the White House, less than a week after the inauguration. Just a year ago, she was a knockabout GOP pollster and talking head, a casino worker’s daughter who’s never quite shaken her South Jersey accent. But she’d understood something about the electorate that others had missed, and now here she was: perhaps the most powerful woman in America, a senior counselor to the president of the United States, a member of Donald Trump’s core team of top advisers. “Winning may not be everything,” she said, leaning forward over her paper cup of hot cocoa and giving a wink of one mascara-clotted blue eye. “But it’s darned close.”</p><p>Winning, Conway contended, was exactly what Trump was doing as president—just look at the number of executive actions he’d already signed. He was outpacing Obama, she said. “Not that it’s a contest.” When I told her I recalled Republicans depicting Obama’s executive orders as Constitution-defying, dictatorial abuses of power, she replied, “Well, I don’t know that I would have said that.” And then came a blast of her signature verbal fog: “But the difference is that—it depends on the issue. Is it something that should be legislatively fought? And now that we have a government that functions that way, this president is taking the reins and doing that—operating, in part, that way.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>Since taking over Trump’s flailing campaign in August, Conway has become famous for her insistence on Trump’s looking-glass version of reality—in which conspiracy theories merit consideration but reported facts are suspect. She claimed, during the campaign, that Trump “doesn’t hurl personal insults,” and that when it came to Barack Obama’s birth certificate, “it was Donald Trump who put the issue to rest.” She once insisted, on CNN, that Trump should be judged by “what’s in his heart” rather than “what’s come out of his mouth.” She has reframed falsehoods as “alternative facts,” invented a terrorist attack (the “Bowling Green massacre”), and flacked for Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, in possible violation of federal ethics rules.</p><p>When Conway’s critics pile on, she just keeps spinning. “She can stand in the breach and take incoming all day long,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, told me. “That’s something you can’t coach.” She’s figured out that she doesn’t need to win the argument. All she has to do is craft a semi-plausible (if not entirely coherent) counternarrative, so that those who don’t want to look past the facade of Trump’s Potemkin village don’t have to.</p><p>There is a playful self-awareness to Conway that tempts observers to believe she’s in on the joke, as in the <i>Saturday Night Live</i> skit in which her character mutters, while Trump’s character appears not to notice, “I’m handcuffed to you for all of history.” But if Conway has any doubts about the rightness of the cause, she doesn’t let them show. While her specious arguments leave interlocutors sputtering, she wields a weaponized calm. (Seth Meyers: “I bet in the next four years we are not going to see the president-elect’s tax returns.” Conway, not missing a beat, with a beneficent smile: “I bet that most Americans really care what <i>their</i> tax returns are going to look like after he’s been president for four years.”)</p><p>Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker (and a former Conway client), told me her effectiveness at “taking on the media” makes her essential to the new administration. “You either decide you’re going to defend Trump and Trumpism, or you let the left browbeat you into doing stupid things,” he said. When I asked whether the administration and the media might be able to find some kind of common ground, Gingrich practically snarled. “Not these people,” he said. “You are all so far to the left, so contemptuous to Trump. Trying to conciliate you is silly. It’s like trying to pet lions.”</p><p>The media lions have seemed to roar louder at Conway with each passing week. But she’s never been afraid to mix it up—sometimes even literally. At one of the inaugural balls, two men in tuxes started scrapping, a witness told the New York <i>Daily News</i>. Conway intervened and, when they wouldn’t stop, punched one of them three times in the face. When I asked her about the fight, she coyly did not deny it. “I’m not commenting on that,” she said, grinning. “Men behaving badly is nothing new to me.”</p><p>Unlike the men with whom she vies for Trump’s favor, Conway isn’t seen as one of the new administration’s centers of power, and she resents the perception that she’s a mere spokeswoman. Now that she’s in the White House, she says, she has an expansive role overseeing numerous policy areas.</p><p>Conway’s claims to centrality can at times come across as self-aggrandizing and exaggerated. (Her insistence, for example, that then–National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn “does enjoy the full confidence of the president,” hours before Flynn resigned, suggested that she had been left out of the loop.) But Bannon told me she played a much more important role in laying the early groundwork for Trump’s movement than almost anyone knows. And she seems to have a unique ability to steer the impulsive president—who is, by all accounts, more attuned to what’s on cable news than to any white paper or policy briefing.</p><p>During the transition, Conway began publicly criticizing, on Twitter and on television, Trump’s consideration of Mitt Romney for secretary of state. Romney and Trump were in the midst of a high-profile courtship, and Romney was reportedly a leading contender for the job, when Conway tweeted that she was receiving a “deluge” of feedback from Trump fans who would feel “betrayed” by Romney’s selection.</p><p>“What were his special qualifications for that, is all I asked,” she told me. “Losing Michigan by 10 points, when Donald Trump won the state, certainly wouldn’t have been a qualification. Was Mitt Romney negotiating cease-fires in Aleppo and somehow I missed it?”</p><p>The public airing of such a sensitive personnel matter caused a sensation. It was suggested that Conway had “gone rogue,” and on <i>Morning Joe</i>, Trump was said to be “furious” with her for her insubordination. She called him up to see whether this was true. He said it was not, and she proceeded to explain why she was so opposed to Romney: She hadn’t forgiven him for his role in the “Never Trump” movement, including a speech calling Trump a “con man.”</p><p>“I just told him that I know how things go,” she explained: “Every single time Secretary of State Mitt Romney would have deplaned in a foreign country … they would go to the B-roll of him in front of the orange-and-white background, mocking Trump Water, Trump Steaks, Trump’s character, his integrity, his message—him. And that would never have gone away, and he deserves better.”</p><p>Romney dined with Trump in New York and gave a public statement that seemed to retract his previous concerns and expressed confidence in the president-elect. Nonetheless, he was passed over. Trump chose Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil CEO, for the post instead.</p><p>“Judas Iscariot got 30 pieces of silver; Mitt Romney got a dish of frog legs at Jean-Georges. And even at that, it was the appetizer portion,” a high-ranking White House official told me. “We’ve sort of taken out his larynx—how can he criticize [Trump] now?”</p><p>The episode was, Conway said, an example of her method: operating “dimensionally,” not “linearly,” to get results. She pointed to a dinner where Trump told a group of diplomats that Tillerson was “a man that I wanted right from the beginning.” In the end, Conway hadn’t just gotten her way. She had made the president think it was his idea all along.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps"><strong>C</strong><span class="caps">onway’s hometown</span></span><span class="smallcaps"><span class="caps"> </span></span>of Atco, New Jersey, is the sort of featureless place that takes its name from a corporate acronym—<i>Atco</i> is short for the Atlantic Transport Company, which, at the turn of the 20th century, ordered some ships built nearby. She prides herself on staying rooted here, in the Real America that fancy people can’t quite grasp—the America that defied conventional wisdom and handed Trump the presidency. Conway can claim to speak for Trump’s base, that is, because she’s one of them.</p><p>Just off White Horse Pike, a single-story stone house sits on a raised mound of earth that makes it tower above its neighbors, its driveway a steep slope. When I rang the bell one afternoon in early February, Conway’s 73-year-old mother, Diane Fitzpatrick, answered the door. “My mom always wanted a house on a hill,” Fitzpatrick said, by way of explanation. “So my father built a hill.”</p><p>Fitzpatrick welcomed me into the dining room. The walls were a bright, cheerful yellow, the windows hung with filmy curtains. Every surface was choked with clutter—silk plants, prescription bottles, angel figurines, crosses, little plaques with sayings about family and faith. Through a doorway I could see an enormous framed photograph of Conway and her family hanging over the fireplace; on a set of shelves were a signed photo of Trump and a Mother’s Day note from him. The house was a shrine—to God, to Trump, and to Kellyanne.</p><p>Fitzpatrick has lived in this house on and off for 60 years, since she was a teenager. She’d wanted to be a traditional homemaker, but her marriage ended in 1970, when Conway was 3. Fitzpatrick went to work, eventually spending 21 years as a cashier working the night shift at the Claridge casino in Atlantic City, relying on her mother and two unmarried sisters to help raise her only child.</p><p>Conway went to Catholic school in Hammonton, 10 miles down the road, where she was a cheerleader and played field hockey and was first in her class. “I always told her you have to do your best,” Fitzpatrick said. “But she had to <i>be</i> the best.”</p><p>Conway spent eight summers packing blueberries at a nearby farm, where she sometimes drew onlookers with her remarkable, automaton-esque speed and ability to work for long stretches without a break. She brought a similar intensity to her schoolwork. “I didn’t think she was a deep thinker,” one of her high-school teachers told <i>Cosmopolitan</i>. “But I do remember that she would argue her point relentlessly. You would pray to God that the bell would ring.”</p><p>Fitzpatrick told me her grandparents came from Italy, noting indignantly that they were held at Ellis Island until they could be thoroughly checked—unlike today’s immigrants, she said, who just come right in. “We never wanted anything handed to us,” she said. “My father hated credit cards—‘If you don’t have the money, you don’t need it.’ ” In her day, she added, children respected their parents. “It’s not like the kids you see today, where there’s so much hate in the world.” After a botched back surgery in 2001 left Fitzpatrick unable to stand for long periods, she sued her doctor and retired on permanent disability.</p><p>The country, as she described it, is at the mercy of atheists and agitators who want to tell “the majority” how to live their lives. Fitzpatrick was kindly and hospitable, serving me coffee and snacks in neat little bowls. But once she got going, she could barely contain her disgust at the snobs and celebrities who were not giving the new president the chance he deserved—people like Ashton Kutcher, who lambasted Trump at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January. “I’d like to kick the TV in, honest to God.”</p><p>President Obama “pitted the blacks against the whites,” she said. “If something happened to a black person, he and his wife were right there. But if something happened to a white person, you never saw them, did you?” Attending the inauguration with her daughter, Fitzpatrick was relieved to hear God mentioned for what she believed was the first time in eight years.</p><p>Conway and her husband, George, a conservative litigator (who as of press time was said to be in the running for solicitor general), own a $6 million house in Alpine, New Jersey, a wealthy suburb of New York two hours from Atco. But Fitzpatrick told me that Conway hasn’t forgotten where she comes from: “She has been all over the world, but it hasn’t changed her any—not at all.”</p><p class="dropcap"><strong><span style="text-transform:uppercase;">F</span></strong><span class="smallcaps"><span class="caps">rank Luntz,</span></span><span class="smallcaps"><span class="caps"> </span> </span>the Republican pollster and messaging guru, met Conway in the 1980s at Oxford University, when he was in graduate school and she was on an undergraduate year abroad from Trinity Washington University, in D.C. Lonely, homesick, and surrounded by stuffy Brits, Luntz was immediately drawn to Conway. “She already was political, and right of center,” he recalled. “The smile, the blond hair, the vivaciousness, a little bit flirtatious—she was just fun.”</p><p>One time, she and a couple of friends took Luntz shopping and made him try on a Speedo so they could laugh at him. “I’ve been fat for, like, 15 years, but I wasn’t always fat,” he told me. “Nevertheless, a guy like me should not put on a Speedo.” This sounded humiliating and cruel to me, but Luntz insisted it was hilarious.</p><p>Conway went to law school at George Washington University and accepted an offer to work for a D.C. firm, but reneged when Luntz asked her to join his polling company instead. They traveled the world together, and loved to play pranks, such as pretending they were husband and wife and having a noisy argument in an elevator. After a few years, she left to start her own company. While building her business, Luntz told me, Conway said things about him that hurt his feelings, and the two didn’t speak for several years. They have since reconnected.</p><p>A few firms dominate Republican campaign polling, and Conway’s was never one of them. But she carved out a niche helping politicians and corporations understand women. Though she’s an unapologetic career woman who married at 34 and had the first of her four children at 37, Conway views feminism as unnatural and man-hating. She says “femininity” is more important, is strongly opposed to abortion, and thinks that women should cherish traditional roles, not a sense of victimhood. The post-inauguration Women’s March left her notably unmoved. “Marching on the Mall with vagina hats on?” she said. “Your mom must be so proud.”</p><p>In the 1990s, Conway began appearing often on TV, spouting the standard Republican line on Bill Maher’s and Chris Matthews’s shows. She seemed like a member in good standing of D.C.’s political-hack crowd. But as a pollster, she worked for certain groups that other Republicans avoided or dismissed as fringe, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones,” and the Center for Security Policy, a think tank headed by Frank Gaffney Jr., which has been accused of pushing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Her 2015 poll for the center claimed to show that a majority of American Muslims supported Sharia law in the United States, but it was widely criticized for methodological flaws; that December, Trump cited it when he first proposed banning Muslims from entering the country.</p><p>“Remember, Kellyanne was not a mainstream pollster,” Bannon told me. “She had every marginal act out there. Social issues, security moms, immigration—she was a <i>movement</i>-conservative pollster.” It was in that capacity, he said, that she played a pivotal role in upending the GOP establishment.</p><p>After Romney lost the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee concluded, in its “autopsy” report, that the party needed to broaden its appeal. Supporting immigration reform, and thus bringing in Hispanic voters, was the only way forward—a position shared across the Republican establishment, from the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> editorial page to the Chamber of Commerce to the Koch brothers. Donald Trump, then hosting <i>The Apprentice</i>, said Romney had lost because his “self-deportation” policy alienated Hispanic voters.</p><p>But there was another view: that Romney lost because he’d failed to inspire white working-class people, many of whom stayed home in 2012. This idea, laid out by an analyst named Sean Trende for <i>RealClearPolitics</i> and known as the “missing whites” theory, became the major counterpoint to the GOP autopsy. It held that Republicans didn’t need to do better with minorities; they could instead turn out a bigger share of white voters, particularly rural, blue-collar white voters.</p><p>One way Republicans could win, Conway believed, was by arguing for stricter immigration policies. She told me she had long understood how the issue resonated with struggling voters. They were willing to do unglamorous jobs to support their families—to hang drywall or mow lawns—but found themselves undercut by immigrants who would “work under the table for peanuts.” It wasn’t fair, but the elites—and many politicians—didn’t seem to think their concerns were even worth mentioning.</p><p>In 2014, Conway was part of a group of Republicans that produced a poll for FWD.us, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration-advocacy nonprofit. It showed that immigration reform was a political necessity for the GOP—a finding at odds with the line Conway had been pushing since the 1990s. Two months later, she produced a different poll, demonstrating that “enforcement of current law” and “encouraging illegal immigrants to return to their home countries” could be a winning message. She presented her findings to a group of Republican donors, who rebuffed her. But the poll found favor with opponents of immigration reform. The far-right website Breitbart .com (then headed by Bannon) hailed it as a “blockbuster.”</p><p>The poll was credited to Conway, but it was paid for, I discovered, by the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA, a longtime client of hers. After she circulated her findings, Republicans began to embrace previously taboo positions. NumbersUSA’s executive director, Roy Beck, watched in amazement as one Republican presidential candidate after another—Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, even Jeb Bush—began parroting his group’s arguments. Trump was the most ardent convert. “Trump started out at, like, a C-minus” on the group’s report card, Beck told me. But he got with the program. “He just kept improving, focusing his message more and more on what was good for the worker.”</p><p>Bannon told me Sean Trende’s “missing whites” theory and Conway’s polling on immigration formed “the intellectual infrastructure” of 2016’s populist revolt. He added that Conway was part of a “cabal” he had started to build with Jeff Sessions and Sessions’s then-aide Stephen Miller, who is now a senior White House policy adviser. “This is her central thing,” he said, “the reason I got to know her.”</p><p class="dropcap"><strong><span style="text-transform:uppercase;">I</span></strong><span class="smallcaps"><span class="caps">n 2006, </span></span>the<span class="smallcaps"> </span>Conways were living in Trump World Tower, a hulking skyscraper across from the United Nations, when the condo board sought to remove Trump’s name from the building. George Conway took Trump’s side and gave an eloquent speech at a meeting Trump attended, arguing that removing his name would decrease the value of the building’s apartments. Trump called him afterward to thank him, and two days later the property manager offered George a seat on the board. He didn’t want it, but Kellyanne did, and that’s how she met Trump.</p><p>Conway says she recognized early in the 2016 campaign that Trump was connecting with voters. But despite an early overture from Trump, she initially signed on to run a super <span class="smallcaps">pac</span> supporting Ted Cruz. The reclusive father-and-daughter megadonors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, whom Conway considers friends, poured more than $10 million into the effort. In that role, she occasionally bashed Trump, such as when she said he had built his fortune “on the backs of the little guy.”</p><p>But after Cruz dropped out, the Mercers threw their support behind Trump and got him to hire Conway as a pollster. In August, when the campaign was foundering under the direction of Paul Manafort, Trump made Bannon the campaign’s CEO and promoted Conway to campaign manager, again at the Mercers’ urging.</p><p>It was a job many top-flight consultants wouldn’t have touched, and Trump’s critics dismissed Conway as a junior-varsity talent leading a doomed mission. “No one in D.C. before this ever woke up in the morning and said, ‘My God, this campaign will go nowhere without Kellyanne Conway,’ ” says Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant who opposed Trump and worked for the independent conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin.</p><p>But when Conway took charge, in August, Trump stopped giving press conferences, which had been erratic and freewheeling; started using a teleprompter more frequently at rallies; and dialed back his tweets. She quickly developed a reputation as the “Trump whisperer,” a perception she encouraged. It wasn’t that she was moderating him, or pushing him toward policies with mainstream appeal—she was taking his pugilistic instincts and funneling them in a more productive direction.</p><p>When the campaign hit its low point, in October, with the release of the <i>Access Hollywood </i>tape on which Trump boasted about groping women without their consent, Conway’s indomitable faith in Trump appeared, from the outside, to be flagging. She canceled her planned appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as some suggested Trump might drop out. But Conway soon reemerged, insisting that while the comments on the tape were “indefensible,” she believed Trump when he said they were just words, and that he had never acted on them. She implied that when she was “younger and prettier,” she’d endured sexual harassment from some of the lawmakers now sitting in judgment of him. And she stuck to her script even after about a dozen women came forward to say that Trump had forced himself on them.</p><p>Bannon says it was Conway’s calm presence that led both wavering women and conservative voters to think, <i>If she can still support Trump, I can, too</i>. “If Kellyanne had not been there when the firestorm hit, I don’t know if we would have made it,” he told me. “She literally became a cult figure during that time period, just because of her relentless advocacy for Trump on TV.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="422" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/03/WEL_Ball_ConwayInside/a6f364735.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway at a victory party on election night. “If Kellyanne had not been there when the firestorm hit, I don't know if we would have made it,” says Steve Bannon. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty)</figcaption></figure><p>The idea that she was merely a spokeswoman rather than a true campaign manager misses the point, Bannon said: Communications was everything to Trump, an instinctive marketer who didn’t believe in much traditional campaign organization. Coordinating field efforts, placing ad buys—those functions were secondary. “People say, ‘She wasn’t really campaign manager.’ I say, ‘No offense, this wasn’t the Bush campaign.’ ”</p><p>Frank Luntz agrees with Bannon that Trump couldn’t have won without Conway’s defense of him after the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tape came out. “He owes her for standing up for him,” Luntz said. “I could not have done what she did.”</p><p>I told Luntz, who has mixed feelings about Trump, that this didn’t exactly sound like a compliment. But he insisted that it was. “I would not have survived it; I’m impressed that she did,” he said. “In every possible sense, she won. I do not believe he would be president without her.”</p><p class="dropcap"><strong><span class="smallcaps"><span style="text-transform:uppercase;">C</span></span></strong><span class="smallcaps"><span class="caps">onway’s new West Wing quarters</span></span> are upstairs from the Oval Office, in a space previously occupied by Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longtime friend and confidante. Before it was Jarrett’s, Conway told me, the office was Karl Rove’s. And before that, in a bit of trivia Conway relishes, it belonged to Hillary Clinton, who demanded a West Wing office for her policy work in addition to the first lady’s traditional East Wing quarters.</p><p>As we talked, a makeup artist from Fox News entered, setting her supplies out on an otherwise bare side table and draping a black-plastic cape over Conway’s shoulders. “I’ve got to multitask, or I go on TV looking like <i>this</i>,” Conway said, unpinning her platinum-dyed hair. She has a disarming matter-of-factness about her looks. Dispute her claim that she has bad hair and she will retort, “I have other assets—feet and hair are not among them,” then go on to tell you about the bunion surgery she badly needs but has no time for.</p><p>A few days earlier, Conway had appeared on <i>Meet the Press</i> and coined a term that neatly encapsulated the administration’s relationship with the truth: <i>alternative facts</i>. The phrase spawned dozens of think pieces, the British prime minister used it to accuse a political rival of lying, and sales of George Orwell’s <i>1984</i> spiked.</p><p>When I asked Conway about the incident, she insisted that it was no big deal in Trumpworld—a blip, a trivial error, virtually a typo. “What I meant to say was <i>alternative information</i>,” she said, giving an example: Three plus one equals four, but so does two plus two.</p><p>Anyway, she contended, nobody cared about “alternative facts” except the elite, out-of-touch intelligentsia who spend all day winding one another up in the echo chamber of Twitter and cable news. “It was haters talking to each other and it was the media,” she said, adding that requests from TV bookers continued to stream in.</p><p>Most important, Trump himself loved it. After the appearance, Conway texted Chuck Todd, the show’s host, to let him know that Trump thought he’d been disrespectful to her, and Todd wrote back. “He said, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ ” she told me. “I said, ‘That wasn’t me. The president asked me to send that to you.’ So anybody trying to divide us here is going to have the opposite effect. He thought that was one of my best appearances. Because he watched the whole thing.”</p><p>A week later, the “Bowling Green massacre” inspired a similar outcry—and a similarly nonchalant response from Conway. I texted her afterward to ask whether she was in trouble with Trump. “Not at all,” she replied. “Why would I be?”</p><p>It was, of course, impossible to know whether this was true.</p><p>With each successive Conway outrage, her “haters” hold their breath and wait to see if the ax will finally fall. Trump bestows his favor unpredictably, and veterans of past Republican administrations look at the chaos in the White House and say a shake-up is inevitable. “The White House was not set up in a functional way,” a former high-ranking official in George W. Bush’s administration told me. “This is unsustainable.”</p><p>But insiders say Conway is largely untouchable. Jason Miller, who worked for the campaign and the transition team, told me he couldn’t imagine Conway losing her job: “One thing people don’t quite get is that she is a living, breathing folk hero for millions of people around the country.”</p><p>To doubt that Conway’s comeuppance awaits is to question the laws of political gravity, or even the basic concept of right and wrong. “She’s able to sit there with a straight face and say, over and over, ‘No, the sky has never, ever been blue, and it’s true because we won,’ ” says Rick Wilson, the anti-Trump consultant. “She’s going to have to, at some point, reckon with the moral compromises it takes to do the things she’s doing.”</p><p>In a universe that operates according to normal rules, that might be true—actions are supposed to have consequences; people are supposed to stop listening to you when you prove that you can’t be trusted. But as Donald Trump showed again and again throughout the campaign, those rules aren’t as binding as we may have once believed.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedWG600; Carolyn Kaster / AP; NASAKellyanne’s Alternative Universe2017-03-14T06:00:00-04:002017-07-10T10:05:42-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:39-517821Will the truth ever catch up with Trump’s most skilled spin artist?<p>It is a funny feeling to realize you may have unwittingly come into contact with Russian intelligence—but not, these days, a totally uncommon one in Washington.</p><p>“There I was, standing in the entrance hall,” recalled Trevor Potter, a prominent election lawyer and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. This was in December, at a lavish holiday party at the French ambassador’s residence, teeming with D.C. types—diplomats, journalists, consultants, lobbyists, current and former officials. Potter had just entered when he saw the French ambassador, whom he knew, conversing with a man he didn’t know: a stocky, Slavic-looking fellow in a dark suit.</p><p>“The French ambassador said, ‘Do you know Sergey, the Russian ambassador?’ I said I did not, and we shook hands,” Potter told me recently.</p><p>At the time, there was nothing particularly notable about the encounter. But now, with Congress and federal investigators probing alleged Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election, it feels a little bit creepy. The ambassador Potter met that night, Sergey Kislyak, is a central figure, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/politics/jeff-sessions-russian-ambassador-meetings/index.html">alleged</a> to be a high-level Kremlin spy, and his every phone call and handshake with associates of President Trump has come under <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/trump-kislyak-timeline/519027/?utm_source=feed">close examination</a>.</p><p>Kislyak’s phone calls with Michael Flynn, and Flynn’s apparent misstatements about the contents of those calls, cost the onetime national security adviser his job last month. Kislyak’s undisclosed meetings with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator, have caused Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Kislyak’s contact with Trump—a brief hello at a reception before a speech hosted by a D.C. think tank—has raised <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/sergey-kislyak-russian-ambassador-profile-235625">further alarm</a>.</p><p>Suddenly, everyone who’s ever met Kislyak is suspect, and Kislyak himself a subject of fascination. (In recent press reports, he has been described in conflicting terms: Is he a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/sergey-kislyak-russian-ambassador.html?_r=1">cordial man-about-town</a> or an <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/alimwatkins/this-is-the-russian-ambassador-that-trumps-administration-ke?utm_term=.vs5PqwQeRL#.wxmno0PjAd">under-the-radar homebody</a>?) An idle chat has become a “contact,” that sinister term of spycraft. And for those who circulate in Washington politics and policy circles, the whole affair hits close to home—a peeled-back corner of the spy game always being played below the capital’s surface.</p><p>What seems like networking can turn out to be something else entirely. One former congressional staffer, who worked for a member of the House International Relations Committee, told me that a few years ago he was offered a cash payment equivalent to his annual salary to pass along committee documents related to Taiwan.</p><p>“This guy just called out of the blue and asked me to lunch,” the former staffer recalled. The “guy” was an American who had previously worked as a congressional chief of staff. “And that was the offer he made—my current salary, in cash.”</p><p>The staffer, who had a security clearance, turned down the offer and reported the contact to his security officer, who said the guy was “on the radar” of American intelligence. The same staffer said he was once asked for classified information by a Malaysian embassy official; a friend who worked for a member of the Agriculture Committee was told to watch out for Chinese spies who supposedly hung out at the Hawk ’n’ Dove, a Capitol Hill bar, to eavesdrop on staffers’ conversations.</p><p>Staffers with security clearances are trained to spot this sort of thing, but those without clearance receive little in the way of security training. They have access to power and are prone to gossip. Many come in as interns, or fresh from a local campaign. A second former congressional staffer recalled repeatedly being asked on dates by an attractive woman from the Israeli embassy who had also been out with many of his friends. When they finally did go out, he couldn’t shake the feeling it might be “an old-fashioned honeypot scene,” he said, and declined her offer to come home with him.</p><p>Was he just being paranoid? In Washington, it can be impossible to discern what is on the level and what is not, what is paranoia and what is justified. Did a bunch of conservative bloggers suddenly develop opinions about the Malaysian regime in 2011 out of sincere conviction, or because they were being paid off? (It <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/covert-malaysian-campaign-touched-a-wide-range-of-american-m?utm_term=.venGD8nblZ#.eqVxPmVpkE">turned out to be the latter</a>.) Why did several prominent think tanks suddenly hold discussions and publish reports in favor of Norwegian oil drilling? (They were getting millions of dollars from the Norwegian government, according to a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html"><em>New York Times</em> investigation</a>.)</p><p>Foreign propaganda, which is legal lobbying as long as it’s disclosed, pokes into everyday life in odd ways. A few years ago, numerous D.C. buses and Metro stations were suddenly festooned with <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/khojaly-massacre-awareness-campaign-underway-in-washington-dc-192348271.html">an awareness campaign for a decades-past war crime in Azerbaijan</a>, the Khojaly Massacre. Regular D.C. commuters were left to wonder what the posters were about—in this case, the geopolitical rivalry between Azerbaijan, an oil-rich dictatorship, and its politically powerful neighbor, Armenia. According to a public-relations staffer whose firm turned down the work, the campaign actually had a primary target audience of one: the wife of a top official in Azerbaijan’s government, who frequently came to D.C. for shopping trips.</p><p>This is simply the way things work in a superpower’s capital city. There is the Washington most of its residents live in, and then there is the one underneath, where allies and enemies jockey for influence and information. You think you’re living in an episode of <em>Veep</em>, and you find out you’re living in an episode of <em>The Americans</em>.</p><p>“Welcome to Washington—you’re not in Kansas anymore,” Tom Nichols, a national-security expert who teaches at the Naval War College, told me. When he was a Senate adviser, he recalled, he and his now-ex-wife, who worked for the CIA, could not talk about their work over dinner due to their differing clearances. “It’s the weirdest city in the world,” he said. “I would never say anything out loud in D.C. that I wouldn’t want to see on the news crawl in Times Square.”</p><p>There is a line, Nichols and other security experts are quick to note, between legitimate and illegitimate foreign activity, between information-gathering and intelligence work, between a lobbyist and a bagman. No one should be surprised or scandalized that the Russian ambassador attends public events and seeks meetings with lawmakers—that’s his job, and there’s nothing wrong with it. “This is what you do as a diplomat,” Andras Simonyi, a former Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., told me. “If you’re an ambassador and you’re not trying to meet CEOs and senators and presidential candidates, you’re crazy.”</p><p>Still, Simonyi said, one should be careful what one gossips about with a Russian at a D.C. party, and what compliments one takes at face value. They are famous for their skill at cultivating the naive. “‘Ah, you’re such a charming young lady, why don’t you come to the celebration we’re having for the national day of Russia?’ Don’t ever accept an invitation from the Russian embassy unless you know what you’re doing,” he said.</p><p>Certain countries’ ambassadors are D.C.-famous for their socializing—these days the master is <a href="http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/his-town/">Yousef Al Otaiba</a> of the United Arab Emirates, whose country’s oil wealth bankrolls star-studded galas, donations to charities and think tanks, and constant schmoozing at the highest levels. In 2013, Otaiba threw a 50th birthday party for the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough; this January, he hosted an Alfalfa Dinner <a href="http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/playbook/2017/01/the-morning-after-impact-of-trumps-immigration-order-inside-koch-world-and-the-alfalfa-dinner-sunday-best-katy-tur-is-engaged-bday-paul-ryan-218454">after-party at Cafe Milano</a> whose attendees included Rex Tillerson, Jeff Bezos, presidential adviser Gary Cohn, and multiple members of the Cabinet and Congress. Those who have taken his private-jet junkets to the Formula One Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi include a former Air Force chief of staff. </p><p>“They’re all being wined and dined, it’s incredibly glamorous, and he has put himself in a position of getting extraordinary access to all kinds of information,” a prominent D.C. socializer and sometime Otaiba guest told me, on the condition his name not be used. “The influence is palpable, but people don’t want to see it, because they enjoy the largesse.” Otaiba’s web of connections is obviously aimed at improving his country’s stature and relations with the U.S.; it is also <a href="http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/his-town/">alleged to have influenced American policy</a> in the Mideast. If you are a D.C. climber, you can hardly do better than to be on his invitation list.</p><p>It can all begin to feel like a conspiracy. Living in D.C. or its suburbs, you may meet a neighbor at a block party who can’t tell you what she does for a living. A bunch of vans racing through local traffic may actually be <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/secrets-next-door/print/">engaged in surveillance training</a> for the N.S.A. Washington journalists’ emails have allegedly been <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/google-hackers-russia-journalists-234859">targeted by hackers</a> in recent months. You start looking over your shoulder in this town, and before long you’ve gone down the path of the black-helicopter crowd. <em>How deep does it go? What do they have on you?</em></p><p>But it’s not paranoia, as the old joke goes, if they’re really out to get you. The current Russia revelations may have people on edge because they’ve exposed something that has been true for a long time: The best soft targets don’t know they’re soft targets.</p><p>A top official on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign told me that the Secret Service at one point became concerned that Chinese hackers had penetrated the campaign’s computer network at its Boston headquarters. “That weekend, all these guys who looked like they worked at Home Depot showed up and spent the weekend putting in new hardware,” the official recalled. “Then the Service admonished us not to put anything in email that we thought was sensitive—that lasted about 24 hours.”</p><p>The staffers disregarded the warning and went back to their old habits, because the threat just didn’t seem real. But the episode looks very different now, after the release of hacked emails from Democratic committee staffers and Clinton campaign officials threw the 2016 campaign into chaos, even though they consisted mostly of political hacks’ silly office banter.</p><p>“I guess I never really understood this completely,” the Romney official said in retrospect. “It was like, <em>what are they going to do, try to sell this? It’s just campaign stuff</em>.”</p><p>That night at the French ambassador’s Christmas party, Trevor Potter struggled to come up with small talk after meeting Kislyak. The palatial mansion was adorned with winter decorations, including <a href="http://static.politico.com/cf/c5/125663dd46ed9126d8c60dce72f5/penguins.jpg">a group of penguins on a staircase</a> glittering with fake snow. Potter remarked that the display must remind Kislyak of the climate back home. Without a trace of humor, Kislyak sternly informed him that penguins live exclusively in the southern hemisphere; there are none in Russia.</p><p>With the alleged Russian meddling that was much in the news, Potter didn’t want to bring up the election, but not because he was mindful of the potential intelligence implications. “It just would have been impolite,” he said.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJames Lawler Duggan / ReutersWashington's Spy Paranoia2017-03-13T05:00:00-04:002017-04-26T07:25:20-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-519321Who did the Russian ambassador meet in D.C.? Welcome to America’s capital city, where everyday encounters may not be what they seem.<p>Just over a month ago, Donald Trump thundered into the White House with a bold declaration. “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining, but never doing anything about it,” he said. Instead, he contended, “Now arrives the hour of action.”</p><p>Trump promised to steamroll the Washington status quo, disrupting both Republicans and Democrats. He would replace the elite consensus of both parties with a new, populist-nationalist philosophy, and bully Congress into submission.</p><p>One month in, Trump has certainly succeeded in kicking up a frenzy of news and controversy. It surrounds him at all times, like the cloud of dust around Pig-Pen in <em>Peanuts</em>. But when it comes to taming Washington, the results are decidedly mixed. Instead, it is the Republican Party—in the form of Congress and conservative institutions—that seems mostly to be in charge, and Trump who is being tamed.</p><p>The things Trump has succeeded in doing have largely been things Republicans already wanted before he came along: naming a strongly conservative Cabinet and Supreme Court nominee. At the points where Trump’s platform clashed with GOP elites—trade, immigration, and foreign policy—he has softened or been rebuked.</p><p>On the big-ticket items he vowed to force through—health-care and tax reform—he has found himself at the mercy of the usual slow-moving, politically balky congressional processes. And on economic policy, it is not at all clear the GOP will go along with Trump’s calls for building infrastructure and preserving entitlements, particularly if these priorities come at the cost of balanced budgets.</p><p>Meanwhile, much of Trump’s attention has been consumed with trash-talking tweets, complaints about his treatment by the press, and executive orders that do little to move policy. Beyond all that bluster, who’s really in charge? Here’s a breakdown of some major policy areas:</p><p><strong>A Conservative-Pleasing Cabinet</strong>: The “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trump’s strategist, Steve Bannon, put it at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, is underway via Trump’s executive branch. Agency heads like Scott Pruitt, at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Betsy DeVos, at the Department of Education, seem inclined to dismantle the departments they’ve been tapped to lead. This leaves liberals aghast, but to conservatives, it is a feature, not a bug. They are glad to see Trump dialing back a federal bureaucracy that, in the Obama era, exceeded its legislative mandates to accomplish through regulation what it couldn’t get through Congress, like curtailing carbon emissions.</p><p><strong>The Republican Establishment’s Dream Supreme Court Pick</strong>: To replace the late Antonin Scalia, Trump named Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge with impeccable credentials, an Ivy League pedigree, and membership in the Federalist Society. Gorsuch’s nomination <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/conservatives-react-to-trump-scotus-pick/515265/?utm_source=feed">gladdened</a> the most Trump-skeptical conservatives, especially the evangelical Christians who held their noses and voted for Trump because the Supreme Court hung in the balance. And it vindicated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s strategy of refusing to consider Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.</p><p><strong>No Real Shift in Trade Policy</strong>: Trump’s campaign-trail opposition to major trade deals was a significant departure from conservative dogma. One of his first actions was to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But that was a purely symbolic action, as Congress had never ratified the deal and members of both parties had soured on it. Trump has not pulled the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement or imposed tariffs on imports. When he briefly <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/white-house-calls-for-a-20-percent-tax-on-mexican-imports.html">floated</a> a 20 percent Mexican-import tax, Republicans swiftly <a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/news/south-carolina-sen-lindsey-graham-is-mucho-sad-about-trump/article_3f27e808-e413-11e6-8b49-2f74888057ca.html">condemned</a> it, and his administration quickly disowned the idea. Congressional Republicans have been working on a border-adjustment tax proposal that they say would accomplish something similar, but Trump has yet to get firmly behind it—and it, too, appears to be <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/divided-lawmakers-look-to-trump-to-lead-on-tax-reform-235428">on the rocks</a> due to opposition from business.</p><p><strong>Immigration Actions Less Than Meets the Eye</strong>: Trump’s hard line against immigration broke with the GOP’s business wing. His administration has <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/14/14596640/immigration-ice-raids">intimidated</a> the undocumented with deportations and raids that have created a climate of fear. But the actual number of deportations is small. Meanwhile, Trump has yet to roll back Obama’s protections for the young immigrant “Dreamers,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/us/politics/daca-dreamers-immigration-trump.html?wpisrc=nl_daily202&amp;wpmm=1">frustrating</a> some immigration hawks. He has ordered the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/ryan-makes-trip-to-us-mexico-border-as-lawmakers-mull-building-trumps-wall/2017/02/22/fbb188ea-f939-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html?utm_term=.4f86d9143839">Mexican border wall</a> be built, but Congress has yet to fund it, and Mexico is still refusing to pay for it.</p><p><strong>A Muslim Ban Dialed Back</strong>: Despite promising in no uncertain terms to temporarily ban all Muslim immigrants, an <a href="http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2015/12/constitution-check-would-a-ban-on-all-muslims-entering-the-u-s-be-valid/">arguably constitutional measure,</a> Trump instead ordered a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/us/travel-ban-customs-border-protection.html">rushed and ham-handed ban</a> on travelers from certain Muslim countries. When the ban was shot down by the courts, Trump rescinded it, and the refined ban that was supposed to replace it has been delayed, in part because his own intelligence community <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-muslim-ban-travel-ban-intelligence-homeland-security-terrorism-threat-us-iran-somalia-a7599126.html">won’t supply evidence for it</a>. Meanwhile, Trump’s new national-security adviser, H.R. McMaster, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/hr-mcmaster-trump-islam.html">dislikes</a> the term “radical Islamic terrorism.”</p><p><strong>Foreign Policy Outrages Subside</strong>: Trump’s supposed willingness to challenge stale foreign-policy orthodoxies has mostly been tempered. When his December <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-taiwan-phone-call-was-weeks-in-the-planning-say-people-who-were-involved/2016/12/04/f8be4b0c-ba4e-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.52711f893885">call to Taiwan</a> defied the U.S.’s long-held one-China policy, his aides insisted the policy was overdue for reconsideration. This month, Trump backed down and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/40825e36-ef3f-11e6-930f-061b01e23655">reaffirmed</a> the one-China policy. Campaign-trail Trump made a lot of noise about questioning America’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/us/politics/donald-trump-issues.html">commitment to NATO</a>, and some experts agreed. But as president, he has given assurances to the alliance: He <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2017/jan/27/donald-trump-and-theresa-may-hold-joint-white-house-press-conference-politics-live">told</a> British Prime Minister Theresa May he was “100 percent behind” it, and Vice President Mike Pence <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/pence-pledges-support-nato-allies-skeptical-558313">pledged</a> the U.S.’s “unwavering” commitment. On Israel, Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/world/middleeast/trump-israel-two-state-solution.html">rattled</a> the longstanding consensus by questioning the two-state solution—only to have United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/nikki-haley-two-state-solution-israel-palestinian-235092">call that</a> an “error.” Even the Russians who once cheered Trump’s friendliness <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/putin-trump-flynn/517224/?utm_source=feed">now see him</a> bending against Vladimir Putin, and there has been no move to roll back sanctions.</p><p><strong>A Health-Care Policy at the Mercy of Congress</strong>: Trump’s <a href="http://www.vox.com/2017/1/20/14343332/trump-obamacare-executive-order">day-one order on Obamacare</a> decreed the administration’s opposition without actually accomplishing any meaningful rollback of the law. He has confused Republicans in Congress by seeming to want to preserve some parts of his predecessor’s signature health-care overhaul even as he demanded they repeal and replace it in short order. Trump has shown little appetite for wading into the details of Republicans’ debates on the issue, and on Monday, he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/trump-health-care-complicated/">told</a> a group of CEOs at the White House, “It's an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”</p><p><strong>Tax Reform Flailing in Congress</strong>: Lowering tax rates and simplifying the tax code has been a longtime GOP talking point—but in practice, it always <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/dave-camp-drops-a-tax-reform-bill-on-his-way-out-the-door/2014/12/23/ec9cb998-863a-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html?utm_term=.51268e45dba2">proves impossible</a> to slaughter the sacred cows of the many competing special interests. Of all the policy areas that could benefit from a fearless negotiator willing to bang heads together and infuriate big-money lobbies, tax reform is number one. But as noted above, Trump appears leery of the border-adjustment tax at the center of the House Republican proposal. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus recently <a href="http://www.startribune.com/trump-month-two-talks-on-health-care-and-on-tax-overhaul/414315213/">told</a> the Associated Press the administration was “discussing and debating” what to do on taxes.</p><p><strong>Infrastructure Shelved by Congressional GOP</strong>: A major pillar of Trump’s departure from GOP orthodoxy was his supposed intent to propose a trillion dollars in government spending to, as he put it in his inaugural address, “build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation.” Democrats <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democrats-set-to-unveil-a-trump-style-infrastructure-plan/2017/01/23/332be2dc-e1b3-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.b51824cb785d">agreed</a> that this would be a great way to accomplish Trump’s goals of rebuilding hollowed-out inner cities and small towns. But Republican leaders have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trumps-infrastructure-challenge-to-republicans/507656/?utm_source=feed">made clear</a> such a plan is not on their agenda <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-infrastructure-plan-gop-233253">anytime soon</a>. Trump appears <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/trump-pledges-to-spend-big-on-infrastructure.html">not to have noticed</a>.</p><p><strong>Budget Blueprints Left at Odds</strong>: The blueprint Trump released Monday hewed to Trump’s promise not to touch Social Security and Medicare while pumping money into the military. It runs <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/us/politics/trump-budget-military.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&amp;rref=homepage&amp;module=Ribbon&amp;version=origin&amp;region=Header&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=Home%20Page&amp;pgtype=article">contrary</a> to the long-held priorities of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wants to reform entitlements and balance the budget. It would require lawmakers to gut domestic spending while lifting spending caps, two difficult political pills to swallow. And Democrats are already <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/27/democratic-legislators-30-states-rebut-trumps-congress-address/98314184/?wpisrc=nl_daily202&amp;wpmm=1">arguing</a> that Trump’s agenda of corporate tax cuts and safety-net-slashing is more pro-Wall Street than pro-worker.</p><p>Governing is hard, and every new president faces a learning curve and procedural hurdles. Obama, Trump’s predecessor, also swept into office with big promises and, despite majorities in Congress, took more than a year to enact health-care reform and financial regulation.</p><p>But much of Trump’s appeal was that, as a businessman and artist of The Deal, he could cut through the dithering and gridlock and partisan bickering. Instead, in his first month, Trump has mostly been the loser in his battles against entrenched institutions. Rather than bend Washington to his will, Trump has, in his first month, mainly bent his priorities to the will of Republicans in Washington.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersTrump's First Month: An Evaluation2017-02-28T05:00:00-05:002017-04-26T06:52:54-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-518058Is the brash new president bending Washington to his will—or being tamed by the status quo?<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/517497/"></iframe>
<p dir="ltr">Since President Trump’s inauguration, protesters around the country have risen in defiance of his presidency. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. After Obama’s inauguration in 2009, a protest movement formed to oppose him—which became known as the Tea Party. In this video, <em>Atlantic</em> writer Molly Ball explains how the Tea Party’s energy led Republicans to victory in the 2010 midterms, and what this tells us about the current resistance’s potential effects. “Today, it’s the Democratic Party that seems dead. They have lost the House and Senate. They control only 16 governorships and 13 state legislatures,” Ball explains. “But now they are hoping their own passionate movement can scramble the political map the way the tea party did.”<br />
<br />
This is the fifth episode of “Unpresidented,” an original series from <em>The Atlantic</em> exploring a new era in American politics.</p>
Daniel Lombrosohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/daniel-lombroso/?utm_source=feedAlice Rothhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/alice-roth/?utm_source=feedMolly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedIs the Anti-Trump Resistance Another Tea Party?2017-02-24T12:52:10-05:002017-02-26T14:04:25-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:178-517497The two movements are strikingly similar.<p class="dropcap">Bob Bennett didn’t think the new president was such a bad guy. To be sure, Bennett, a Republican senator from Utah, had a lot of policy differences with Barack Obama, the Democrat who had just won the 2008 election in a landslide. But just because Bennett was a conservative and the president was a liberal didn’t mean they couldn’t find common ground, or share an interest in governing the country he believed they both loved. Bennett had always worked across the aisle, and he didn’t see why that should change.</p><p>He was as surprised as anyone by the uprising that followed—and cost him his job. The Tea Party, a mass movement that hadn’t even existed two years earlier, had rallied activists and dealt him a humiliating defeat from within his own party.</p><p>Today, a new movement—loosely dubbed “the resistance”—has suddenly arisen in visceral reaction to Donald Trump’s election as president, with thousands taking to the streets. For those who remember the Tea Party, it feels like deja vu.</p><p>The parallels are striking: a massive grassroots movement, many of its members new to activism, that feeds primarily off fear and reaction. Misunderstood by the media and both parties, it wreaks havoc on its ostensible allies, even as it reenergizes their moribund political prospects; they can ride the wave, but they cannot control it, and they are often at the mercy of its most unreasonable fringe.</p><p>There’s no telling, in these early days, where the anti-Trump resistance will lead. But looking back at the Tea Party may hold a clue to what lies ahead, for both the president and his opponents. It burned hot and, in a few years, burned out, without leaving much in the way of lasting institutions—but not before it had reordered Washington and changed the DNA of the political party in its sights.</p><p class="dropcap">“One of the things the activists were upset at my father about was that he was very visible, and looked very happy, during the inauguration,” Bennett’s son Jim, who worked on his last campaign, told me this week. There was an innocent explanation for this: As ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, it was Bennett’s job to swear in the vice president. He had endorsed and campaigned for Obama’s opponent, John McCain. But “my father looked at the peaceful transfer of power as something that transcended party,” his son recalled.</p><p>“The activists said, ‘Why is Senator Bennett up there with Obama looking so happy?’” Jim Bennett added. “He was seen as being complicit.”</p><p>Obama and the Democrats had won the 2008 election so convincingly that many were convinced the Republican Party was pretty much over. But then something started happening. Scattered local protests sprung up in January 2009, just days after Obama was inaugurated. Then, in February, the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s call for a “Tea Party” gave the movement a viral moment—and a name.</p><p>The new administration had announced an executive action that wouldn’t end up affecting very many people, but its critics were convinced it was tantamount to the worst acts of history’s repressive regimes.</p><p>That is, Santelli believed the Obama administration’s new <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/why-politicians-dont-want-to-touch-the-housing-crisis/247292/?utm_source=feed">housing policy</a> was going to put America on the inevitable road to collectivism. “You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy,” he warned.</p><p>Eight days later, coordinated protests unfolded in 40 cities. Many participants told reporters they’d never been politically active before, but they were alarmed by what was happening in Washington and felt they had to speak out. Fox News covered the protests to a degree that sometimes seemed like cheerleading—one of its hosts, Glenn Beck, was <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031500923_pf.html">particularly enthusiastic</a>. The administration, in response, singled out the network and accused it of abandoning journalistic values.</p><p>Longtime conservative players such as the brothers Charles and David Koch sought to lend support to the new grassroots energy, which they believed could advance their pet causes. Many liberals believed the protests were “Astroturf”: a ginned-up creation of Fox and the Kochs that didn’t reflect real grassroots passion. Critics pointed to racist sentiments expressed by some participants as proof the whole movement was extreme. The Tea Party’s self-appointed leaders insisted they were just regular people who’d been galvanized, and that their chief concern was conservative positions on issues. In particular, like the original Boston Tea Partiers, they were against higher taxes. A backronym, “TEA Party,” was said to stand for “Taxed Enough Already.”</p><p>As mad as they were at Obama, the Tea Partiers were really mad at Republicans, who claimed to believe the things they did, but seemed to be just letting the president do whatever he wanted. If the president couldn’t be stopped, they reasoned, it must be because no one was trying hard enough to stop him. Their ostensible allies were selling them out.</p><p>And so they turned on people like Bob Bennett: a conservative but a realist, a career politician who saw the value of compromise, a Republican who believed working with Democrats was the way to get things done. Bennett’s approval rating suddenly <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/03/obama-enjoys-higher-very_n_560716.html">tanked</a> in his home state. Throughout his career, he’d been rated one of the Senate’s most conservative members, but now his opponents argued he wasn’t conservative enough. One of several Tea Partiers challenging him was a political newcomer named Mike Lee who called himself a “constitutional conservative.”</p><p>No senator in Utah’s history had ever failed to advance to the general election. But at the Utah Republican convention in May 2010, Bennett failed to get the 60 percent of delegates he needed to win renomination on the first ballot. In the second round, he finished third. Lee won the nomination, and is still a senator today.</p><p class="dropcap">The defeat of a sitting senator by his own party was an astonishing feat. It would repeat itself later that year in Alaska, where Lisa Murkowski lost the GOP primary to another no-name political novice. (She later won the general election as a write-in candidate.) Candidates bearing the Tea Party mantle defeated “establishment” politicians in open primaries across the country for House, Senate, and governor, championed by talk radio and blogs like<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/is-the-most-powerful-conservative-in-america-losing-his-edge/383503/?utm_source=feed"> RedStat</a>e. To survive, sitting Republican officeholders scrambled to prove their Tea Party bona fides.</p><p>For the Obama administration, meanwhile, this was all very puzzling. As a Democratic senator, Obama had gotten along with Republican colleagues like Bennett and Indiana’s Richard Lugar (who would be defeated by a Tea Party primary challenger in 2012). Obama thought of himself as a bridge-builder, and he figured Republicans would continue to support policies they’d advocated in the past—the market-based approach to universal health care championed by the Republican governor of Massachusetts; the cap-and-trade plan to address climate change that <a href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2014/may/23/debbie-wasserman-schultz/cap-and-trade-legislation-was-originally-republica/">Republicans had supported</a>; infrastructure spending that liberal and conservative economists believed was needed to stimulate the economy. But Republicans’ near-total resistance meant Obama could only rely on members of his own party, and couldn’t get much done at all once his party no longer had 60 seats in the Senate.</p><p>The mainstream media covered this fight as largely ideological: The Republican Party was moving to the right; conservatives were looking to purge “moderates” from their ranks; “anti-incumbent” rage was in the air. The roots of the Tea Party were said to extend back before Obama was elected, to conservatives’ anger at the Bush administration’s bipartisan bank bailouts, or to the libertarian followers of former Representative Ron Paul.</p><p>People like Glenn Beck, Mike Lee, and Ron Paul’s son Rand, who also defeated an establishment-backed candidate to win a Senate seat in 2010, did believe in a conservative ideology of small government and lower taxes. But it was Obama’s election that had brought the masses out into the streets. And they were willing to believe almost anything that confirmed their worst fears about the president: He was a secret Muslim, not born in the U.S., whose fist-bump of greeting was a secret terrorist signal. The rumors raced around online, impervious to debunking.</p><p>It’s too soon to tell if the current resistance movement will follow the Tea Party’s pattern. But there are already many parallels. It has arisen spontaneously and en masse. Many Republicans believe it’s not real: The protests, they tell me, are Astroturf funded by George Soros; the opposition to Betsy DeVos as education secretary, which jammed Senate switchboards, was merely manufactured by the teachers’ unions. But the unions and Soros didn’t start this fire any more than the Kochs started the Tea Party—they’re merely riding the wave in hopes it will advance their goals.</p><p>Second, Trump’s election appears to have galvanized a lot of people who weren't previously Democratic activists or politically minded at all. They may have voted Democrat, they may consider themselves “progressive,” but they’re not the Democratic base that donated to politicians and knocked on doors in years past. Commentators on the right have seized on the violent sentiments expressed by some participants as proof the whole movement is composed of frightening extremists.</p><p>Third, while Trump’s Cabinet, executive actions, and Supreme Court nominee are sharply and traditionally right-wing, he has an agenda his team believes is truly cross-partisan. Senior White House officials say he is serious about pursuing policies Democrats have supported in the past, like negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices, a big-spending infrastructure bill, and a more protectionist trade policy. Trump’s team sincerely believes at least some Democrats will put governing above partisanship and go along with these initiatives.</p><p>But the movement is already urging Democrats to massively resist, and they are listening. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/viva-la-resistance-content/515532/?utm_source=feed">Viral rumors</a> that <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/democrats-confront-lefty-fake-news?utm_term=.qiMRY30BK2#.jud9rGa6VY">flatter</a> people’s worst assumptions—that Russia hacked the voting machines, that Trump is invading Mexico, that a picture was doctored to make his hands look bigger—<a href="http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/">catch fire</a> with a credulous audience before they can be debunked (and persist long afterward). <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/nancy-pelosi-says-democrats-have-a-responsibility-to-find-co?utm_term=.yyaVpm1vEA#.moXaqLMJm8">Nancy Pelosi</a> and <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/politics/sanders-says-he-would-work-with-trump-for-new-trade-policy-cnntv/">Bernie Sanders</a>, previously considered pretty left-wing, have been attacked for suggesting they could work with Trump. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer drew left-wing protesters at his offices in Brooklyn. When Delaware Senator Tom Carper hugged Trump’s attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, <em>after voting against him</em>, anti-Trumpers <a href="https://twitter.com/StevenTDennis/status/829506659236057088">demanded</a> a primary challenge.</p><p class="dropcap">The surge of energy from the Tea Party terrorized Republicans, but it also boosted them. Brian Walsh, a Republican Senate campaign staffer at the time, recalled welcoming the sudden burst of passion. “When the Tea Party first started, I thought it was great,” he told me this week. “We had just lost the White House and a lot of Senate races. It was great to see the grassroots fired up.”</p><p>Tea Party primaries were a headache for Walsh’s committee, but when the party did well in the midterms, the primary challenges seemed a small price to pay. “I actually thought on balance the Tea Party movement was a net positive for us,” Walsh said. “Though I think, ultimately, it led to Trump.” (Now a partner in a D.C. consulting firm, Walsh opposed Trump in 2016, in part because the now-president had <a href="https://twitter.com/brianjameswalsh/status/780583348762738688">stiffed his father</a> in a business deal.)</p><p>In early 2009, experts predicted Democrats would <a href="http://www.insideelections.com/news/article/2010-senate-races-another-tough-cycle-for-the-republicans">gain even more Senate seats</a> in 2010 and <a href="http://insideelections.com/news/article/april-madness-can-gop-win-back-the-house-in-2010">could not possibly</a> lose the House; Republicans won seven Senate seats and took the House in a wave. Pundits kept saying the Tea Party pushing the GOP to the right would hurt its electoral prospects, but the party gained throughout Obama’s presidency, with the notable exception of the presidential election.</p><p>Meanwhile, some liberals perpetually tried to start a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/working-families-party/422949/?utm_source=feed">parallel left-wing Tea Party movement</a> to purge the Democratic Party of compromisers, but they mostly <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/the-democratic-establishment-won/485378/?utm_source=feed">lost Democratic primaries</a>. Without a president in office who scared the living crap out of rank-and-file voters, the ideologues never had the numbers to prevail.</p><p>In retrospect, no one understood what really made Tea Party voters tick better than Donald Trump. He didn’t embrace conservative positions, but as a doubter of the president’s legitimacy, he had no peer, spouting birtherism long after reporters had investigated and debunked it. Conservatives like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Glenn Beck watched in horror as he made a mockery of their principles—but the base ate it up. And despite the GOP establishment’s—and mainstream media’s, and Hillary Clinton campaign’s—certainty that general-election voters would reject Trump and punish the GOP, the party swept to unprecedented power at all levels.</p><p>As for Bob Bennett, he didn’t live to see the last chapter. He died in May of 2016. On his deathbed, in the hospital, he turned to his wife and son.</p><p>“He asked, ‘Are there any Muslims in this hospital?’ We thought it might have been confusion from the stroke,” Jim Bennett recalled. “And then he said, ‘I’d like to go up to every one of them and apologize on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump.’”</p><hr><h3>Related Videos</h3><p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/p4Fr52wzrLU?feature=player_embedded" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe></p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedAndrew Kelly / ReutersIs the Anti-Trump 'Resistance' the New Tea Party?2017-02-09T04:50:00-05:002017-04-25T10:11:28-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-516105Eight years ago, a new president took office who scared the living daylights out of thousands of people who’d never been politically active before. Sound familiar?<p class="dropcap">Even for some Republicans, it is still a bit unbelievable. They have it all now—all the power. They won it fair and square. Donald Trump is assuming the presidency, and Republicans control the House and Senate.</p><p>They streamed into Washington this week to collect their reward, the activists and party hacks and true believers who helped make it happen. The members of the Republican National Committee, representing every state and territory, gathered in the ornate, slightly dowdy ballrooms of Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel, where they took care of the party’s business between being feted at lunches, receptions, and inaugural balls. The mood was jubilant: Against all odds, after years of frustration, everything they worked for had come to pass.</p><p>The Republicans—a few hundred RNC members and nonmember guests—took their seats in rows of chairs to hear the good news: control of Congress, 33 of 50 governorships, control of the legislatures of 32 states. On the stage, their chairman for the last six years, Reince Priebus, told them their efforts had been key to the party’s success.</p><p>“We’ve got record levels of red all over this country, a mandate from the American people to lead, and the wind at our back to offer a new course for our country!” Priebus exulted. An unassuming lawyer from Kenosha, Wisconsin, Priebus had spent much of the last two years disparaged as inept and mocked for leading his party to ruin; now he was on his way to becoming White House chief of staff.</p><p>But the Republican Party that takes over Washington as Trump assumes the presidency is not one the Priebus of a few years ago might have recognized. Trump won the GOP primary, and then the general election, on a populist-nationalist platform that upended much of the party’s conservative dogma. Many Republican elders abandoned him, offended in principle and sure he could not win. They got their comeuppance on Election Night.</p><p>In the weeks since, Trump has moved on every level to demonstrate his dominance: over the party organization, over Republicans in Congress, over the press and the public arena. Not for him to compromise, to accommodate, to forgive. He enters the White House as determined as ever to divide and conquer, to punish his enemies, to do things his way and sideline the enforcers of the old order.</p><p class="dropcap">Trump entered the Republican Party as an interloper; now, he pulls its strings. To replace Priebus at the helm of the party, Trump picked the chairwoman of the Michigan GOP, Ronna Romney McDaniel, whose uncle, Mitt Romney, had implacably opposed Trump to the end of the campaign.</p><p>But McDaniel proved her loyalty. In mid-October, when Trump’s fortunes were at their nadir—after the debates, after the <em>Access Hollywood </em>tape, when even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/reince-priebus-chief-of-staff.html?_r=0">Priebus</a> was suggesting Trump might have to quit the race, and pundits were saying Republicans would lose the Senate and maybe the House—Wendy Day, a vice chairwoman of the Michigan GOP, joined the chorus of Republicans proclaiming they could not support Trump. McDaniel used her power as chairwoman to <a href="http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/10/17/anti-trump-tea-party-activist-faces-state-gop-ouster/92296560/">eject</a> Day from her post.</p><p>Trump ended up winning Michigan by a quarter of a percentage point, the narrowest margin of any state. On Thursday, as McDaniel was nominated to lead the party, her purging of Day was lauded from the stage: she showed “courage,” said Susan Hutchison, chair of the Washington state GOP, with her “quick decision to improve the situation in her state when someone was going rogue.” The RNC vote to make McDaniel party chair was unanimous.</p><p>The party also has a co-chair, a secondary position that must be occupied by someone of the opposite sex of the chair. This, too, was a demonstration of Trump’s control: It went to Bob Paduchik, who had <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/12/ohio_trump_campaign_director_t.html">led Trump’s campaign in Ohio</a>.</p><p>Paduchik spent 2016 locked in a struggle with his state’s Republican governor, John Kasich, who opposed Trump to the end. The Ohio party apparatus loyal to Kasich held Trump at arm’s length. But even so, Trump won the state by 8 points. And earlier this month, Trump personally telephoned Ohio central committee members to get the Kasich-loyal state chairman, Matt Borges, voted out, and a Trump supporter, Jane Timken, <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2017/01/jane_timken_elected_ohio_repub.html">named to the job</a>.</p><p>That the president-elect would spend his time strong-arming state party activists—and do so publicly—sent shockwaves through what was left of the Republican establishment, putting them on notice that Trump and his people were watching closely and would brook no dissent. “That was the first indication that he was willing to be personally involved in state party politics,” Mike Duncan, a former RNC chairman and 25-year committee veteran, told me, calling the overtness of it “unprecedented.”</p><p>Will Republicans give Trump what he wants, even when it contradicts what they once professed to believe in? Will they have any choice? This is not just the question for members of the Republican National Committee—it is the question that will determine the course of Trump’s presidency in GOP-occupied Washington. (There are, of course, still Democrats, but their numbers are too few, and their strategy appears too muddled, to do much but stall at this point.)</p><p>In between RNC sessions, I chatted in the lobby of the Omni with a couple of nonmember party activists from Texas who had come to observe the proceedings. Bill Eastland, a gray-mustached, twang-voiced accountant from Arlington, Texas, voted for Trump but would have preferred his home-state senator, the conservative firebrand Ted Cruz. He looked forward to what he saw as the upsides of a Trump administration: rolling back environmental and labor regulations, appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court, cutting taxes. But he was staunchly opposed to other Trump-professed ideas—a big-ticket infrastructure spending plan, a federal childcare benefit, tariffs, lower immigration levels—not to mention what he saw as a worrying disregard for the Constitution.</p><p>“The small-government conservatives will stand up against him if he does those things,” Eastland said, including Cruz.</p><p>But his companion, Amy Hedtke, a blogger whose signature is her red-white-and-blue high-heeled platform knee-high boots, laughed and begged to differ. She reminded him how the party’s voters lashed out at those who stood up to Trump on principle during the campaign. Cruz was booed at the GOP convention and is still trying to mend fences with the base.</p><p>“There’s a good portion of us who think Trump is a liberal who basically pulled an Alinsky on the GOP and beat them with their own rules,” Hedtke said. “It’s kind of funny, from an anarchist standpoint.”</p><p>Eastland looked chagrined. “Well, she’s an anarchist,” he said to me. “I have a different view.”</p><p>“He’s going to feed them a shit sandwich, and they’re going to smile and lick it up,” Hedtke insisted. She wore a “Guns Don’t Kill People, Abortion Clinics Do” button. The GOP would, she predicted, redefine conservatism to mean whatever Trump wanted it to.</p><p>Back inside the ballroom, the new party chair, McDaniel, thanked the committee members for her new charge. She did not use the word “conservative” to describe herself. “I am a mom from Michigan,” she said. “I am an outsider. And I am here to make Donald Trump and Republicans everywhere successful!” The Republicans stood and applauded.</p><p class="dropcap">Trump’s fans hope he will master Washington, while Washington generally believes it will master him. A few weeks ago, I went to Capitol Hill for the first day of the new Congress and the election of the speaker of the House. It should have been a festive day for Republicans: “We have the city back!” one GOP chief of staff told me. “The team is in the lead again!” But Republicans’ day of celebration had instead been consumed by self-inflicted controversy.</p><p>The night before, House Republicans had voted behind closed doors to change the structure of the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body that investigates corruption and misconduct. Ryan, the speaker, had urged them not to do it, but most representatives agreed with Bob Goodlatte, of Virginia, that the office was out of control and out to get them, and needed to be curbed.</p><p>The idea that Republicans’ first move of the new term would be to gut ethics oversight generated a torrent of Democratic criticism and public backlash. Outraged phone calls poured in. And then, at 10 a.m., Trump issued a pair of tweets: “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance!”</p><p>Just before taking to the House floor for the noon speaker election, Republicans <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-trump-ethics-office-vote-20170103-story.html">voted to undo</a> the ethics change.</p><p>Most Republicans I spoke to said this would have not happened had Trump not weighed in—ostensibly taking their side, but urging them to recalibrate their priorities. Had Trump stayed quiet, they likely could have weathered the controversy. House Republicans—the same crowd that shut down the government in 2013—are relatively inured to general public pressure, media criticism, and supposed political imperatives. Many viewed the angry phone calls as coming from national pressure groups, not their own constituents.</p><p>But what they do care about is their activist base, and they learned from the campaign that Trump commands it. Some learned this when they tried to distance themselves from Trump and were deluged with anger from within the party. Ryan learned it when he was booed and heckled at a rally in his own district in Wisconsin. It was telling that when Ryan urged his members not to change the ethics office, they ignored him, but when Trump poked them, they scattered.</p><p>The controversy, another GOP staffer told me, was “emblematic” of the new order on Capitol Hill, for good and ill. Trump could use his power for good to unite a Republican caucus that has stalemated Congress and frustrated its own leaders with largely pointless discord; he might be able to break the gridlock. If he does so in favor of the things they want to do, Ryan and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, will be able to quickly undo the Obama years and impose Republican rule.</p><p>But it’s already apparent that it won’t be that simple. When Republicans got to work on a plan to repeal Obamacare on a two- or three-year delay, buying them time to come up with a replacement plan, Trump tweeted his displeasure, pointing out that this would get them blamed for health-care problems without fixing anything. He has repeatedly insisted that they should repeal and replace Obamacare at the same time, and that he wants the new plan to insure everybody.</p><p>Confused by these departures from their own message, Republicans have taken to asserting that Trump must mean something other than what he has said. “We think everybody ought to have access to affordable health-care insurance,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/paulmcleod/republicans-say-they-assume-trump-didnt-mean-to-promise-heal?utm_term=.llLjDxOQ7Y#.fkQd1n7GJ6">told <em>BuzzFeed</em></a>. “I assume that’s what he means by that statement and that’s how we’re proceeding.”</p><p>In place of Trump’s 35 percent tariff, Republicans have been working on a complicated “border adjustment tax.” Trump doesn’t like it, and said so. Republicans are scrambling to assemble funding for Trump’s border wall, even as he insists he will eventually stick Mexico with the bill. Some insist they still want to achieve their longtime goal of <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-ryan-medicare-233610">scaling back entitlements</a>, even as Trump shows no interest in this. Trump’s nominees seem to be breezing through their Senate hearings despite not having completed the customary paperwork.</p><p>There are peeps of dissent: Few Republicans have embraced Trump’s friendly stance on <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/paul-ryan-town-hall-trump-obamacare-233577">Russia</a>; fiscal conservatives warn of blowing up the <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/gop-concerns-deficits-debt-disappear-trump-era-44700335">deficit</a>. But just as in the campaign, when other Republicans on the ticket couldn’t decide whether to stick with Trump or abandon him, the political calculus isn’t clear, and they don’t know how far he will push them out of their comfort zones.</p><p>The incoming administration has competing power centers, with much of the legislative agenda driven by traditional conservatives and Vice President Mike Pence—until Trump notices something, weighs in, and scrambles the equation. But even his own advisers expect Trump to be chastened as he runs up against the reality of the policymaking process. A top administration official told me Trump is prepared to do battle with Republicans on infrastructure, trade, and child care, even as he gladdens them with an industry-friendly slash-and-burn approach to regulation.</p><p>Republican leaders are still hoping to talk Trump into the border tax, the official said, while Trump is serious about getting the GOP to embrace allowing the government to negotiate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/11/trump-on-drug-prices-pharma-companies-are-getting-away-with-murder/?utm_term=.483baf3597c0">prescription-drug prices</a>, an idea Democrats have proposed and Republicans have opposed in the past.</p><p>On Capitol Hill, after the Republicans backtracked on gutting the ethics office, they trickled down to the floor of the House—new members looking anxious and attentive, veterans chatting and mingling. Many had brought young children, dressed in formal clothes. Near the front, former Vice President Dick Cheney sat with his daughter, Liz Cheney, a newly elected representative from Wyoming.</p><p>Cathy McMorris Rodgers, congresswoman from Washington, encouraged the members to embrace their historic opportunity. “We have the opportunity to think big, to put the people back at the center of government,” she said. “And there is no one better to lead the people’s house than Paul D. Ryan.”</p><p>The members cast their votes. House Republicans, so fractious and divided in recent years, their leaders constantly assailed by the right wing, were suddenly in almost total agreement. Only one Republican, a libertarian from Kentucky, voted against Ryan.</p><p class="dropcap">Last week, in New York, I attended Trump’s press conference, the first he has given since July. The timing was ripe for an epic clash: It was only the night before that an explosive, unverified dossier on Trump’s alleged connections to Russia had been published by BuzzFeed and alluded to by CNN. Hundreds of reporters packed into the marble-walled lobby of Trump Tower, jostling for space.</p><p>Trump’s combative press secretary, Sean Spicer, assailed the “sad and pathetic” publication of the dossier. Pence, in his more-in-sorrow-than-anger manner, chided that it was “irresponsible.” But Trump began by offering an ostensible olive branch, saying, “I just want to compliment many of the people in the room,” and praising the news organizations that had <em>not</em> run the dossier or had come out against doing so.</p><p>He touted deals with individual companies who have announced they are adding American jobs and given him the credit. (Many of these claims have not stood up to scrutiny—corporations seem to be attempting to curry favor with the new president by attributing to him things they planned to do anyway—and some conservatives dislike his meddling in markets.) He decried the pharmaceutical industry for “getting away with murder.” He said the inauguration would be “very, very elegant.”</p><p>He took several questions about Russia, confronting the dossier’s unsubstantiated allegations about his sexual conduct with a sort of ridiculous logic—he could not have engaged in certain antics with Russian prostitutes because he is “very much of a germophobe.” (Trump does, in fact, have a long-documented history of discomfort with bodily functions, and for many years prior to the presidential campaign reportedly disliked shaking hands.) He reiterated his desire to have a friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.</p><p>There was a long table next to Trump’s lectern, and it was set with stacks of manila folders. Midway through the questioning, he brought on a lawyer, Sheri Dillon, to explain that the paperwork contained therein would ensure that Trump did not face conflicts of interest between his business and his presidency. Ethics experts, Republican and Democrat, quickly pronounced the arrangement, under which Trump’s sons would run the business, vastly insufficient.</p><p>It was after Trump retook the lectern from Dillon that a CNN reporter, Jim Acosta, tried to ask a question. “Not you,” Trump said, gesturing elsewhere. Acosta persisted. “Your organization is terrible,” Trump said. “Quiet. Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news.”</p><p>Acosta tried to hold his own, but there was nothing he could do. Trump took another question. (Confusingly, he called on a different CNN reporter a couple of questions later.) At the end of the press conference, the manila folders were cleared away without anyone getting to look inside them. The press would feed for days on Trump’s transgressions of everything they held dear.</p><p>Once again, Trump had <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trump-faces-a-weakened-press-corps/512849/?utm_source=feed">divided and conquered his foes</a>. Once again, he had blazed past his haters and gotten his way. They didn't have to like it for Trump to prevail. And soon, he would be sworn in as president.</p>Molly Ballhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/molly-ball/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersWelcome to the Trump Presidency2017-01-20T04:50:00-05:002017-01-20T11:30:30-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-513893He’s moved to establish his dominance of his party, of Congress, and of the media. Now, he turns to the nation.